The Moment (49 page)

“Did you have a good weekend?” she asked.

“It would have been better if you were here. How was Hamburg?”

“My first time there. I was surprised by what a beautiful city it was. But the conference was boring. And Herr Wellmann’s speech was on the dry side. Still I had time to go to the Museum of Modern Art and take a boat across the lake. But I wished you had been there with me. In fact, I wished that all the time.”

I had to fight the urge to tense up and burst out with an accusation that I knew she was lying. Just as part of me kept thinking:
But surely there is an explanation for all this that doesn’t involve . . . him. The man with whom she actually spent the weekend. The man to whom she reports and hands over clandestinely photographed official documents.

“But tell me all about Hans and Heidi Braun,” she said.

I went into the spiel I had been preparing for the past thirty-six hours—how I was brought to the place they are being kept in an official car with blacked-out windows, so I hadn’t a clue where it was. But I had two hours with them. Heidi was rather shy and nervous. But Hans was absurdly outgoing, and said the most outrageously funny things about life in the GDR—especially when it came to gay life over there. But it all turned serious when he described how one of his lovers had been brutally beaten by the police and was still in a coma.

Then I mentioned how we brought the tapes back to the Radio Liberty office and Magdalena Koenig spent the whole of the weekend transcribing them all.

“They were sent by courier to me this morning, and I’ve been reading them through. I must say that when the interview is broadcast, it’s going to be much talked-about. I’m meeting Pawel tomorrow to listen again to the tapes and to decide what we can and cannot use. We have to cut all the material down to half an hour.”

“And they’re planning to broadcast the interview when?”

“As soon as the authorities give us the all-clear—but they want it out by this Friday. Hans Braun has been offered a job with the Freiburg dance company. The New York City Ballet is also interested. The big question is whether his sister will get an offer from either company as well.”

“And how did they get out?”

I told her about how they were snuck out in a van transporting the scenery and lighting equipment of the Dance Theatre of Freiburg.

“They’re quite a politically radical company, aren’t they?” she said.

“Very leftist. In fact, so leftist that they had troubles getting visas for a US tour. But they still decided to help two East German dancers get their freedom.”

“And the Brauns talk about all this in the interview?”

“Yes and in great detail.”

“And the transcript?”

“There are only two copies, and I have one. In fact, tonight I’m going to have to find an hour to work on it, if that’s okay with you, as they need my proposed cuts by tomorrow morning.”

“No problem,” Petra said, her face expressionless. “No problem at all.”

We eventually got out of bed around seven and went to a nearby Italian place for a bowl of pasta and a shared half-liter of their house red. Petra talked excitedly about New York, telling me she’d drafted the statement she had to write for the green card application on the train back to Hamburg, and she was going to type it up tomorrow, and would I read it and correct her “bad English.”

“I’m sure the English is excellent,” I said.

“Will you start speaking with me in English once we get to the States?”

“How about half the time in English, the rest
auf Deutsch
?”

“A good compromise. And do you know what I’d love to do . . . and I have some money saved up, so I’d be able to do this for us . . . is buy a cheap car and spend a couple of months driving across America. We could decide to stay somewhere for a while or move on. You could work every day on your Berlin book. The rest of the time it would be
On the Road with Thomas and Petra
.”

She reached out and put her hand to my face.

“All is going to be wonderful once we are out of this city.”

I nodded many times, hoping she didn’t see how shaky I now was. Why was she painting such a romantic picture of us bombing down a two-lane blacktop in a Chevy if she had been off with
him
all weekend? And what was the subtext behind that comment,
“All is going to be wonderful once we are out of this city”
? Had she found a way out of the clandestine world in which she had been allegedly operating? But if this was the case, could I live with the knowledge that, at the outset of our relationship, she had lied so comprehensively to me about so many things? Is that what the subconscious meaning of her statement was really about—telling me (without telling me) that she was finally breaking with the past?

I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Once there I found myself having to grip the sink or else collapse mentally and physically.

How can you even begin to think that an East German operative would be granted her freedom from any further espionage activity—and given a blessing to marry an American and emigrate to the States
?

Then why is she telling me all this?

Throwing cold water on my face, I managed to quiet myself with one simple thought:
at least you will have answers very soon.

When we got back home, I excused myself to spend an hour working on the transcript. Not once did Petra approach me. Not once did she look over my shoulder or ask if she could peruse the transcripts. Instead she sat on our bed, editing the statement she was writing to support her green card application. I pushed on until ten o’clock, then gathered up the transcript pages and deliberately left them on the table. I went into the bedroom. Petra looked up from her notepad.

“Done already?”

“I’ll get back to it tomorrow before I go in to work on the editing of the actual tapes with Pawel.”

“You must be tired.”

“That I am.”

“But not too tired, I hope.”

She opened her arms to me. We pulled off each other’s clothes again and made love with a deliberateness so slow, so intimate, that I couldn’t help but sense that Petra’s love for me was still as deep and as profound as mine for her. Afterward, she whispered in my ear:

“I will always love you, no matter what happens.”

Then, turning off the light, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Except, of course, I was wide awake with my eyes shut. I was actually damn tired, but I fought the urge to pass out, while simultaneously hoping that in ten or fifteen minutes I would open my eyes and find Petra there beside me, fast asleep. Then I too would drift off into unconsciousness, knowing that I had the answer I so wanted.

If she sleeps, life goes on as planned
.

But if she gets up . . .

Ten minutes later, she did just that. Disengaging herself from my arms. Sitting up in the bed and then not moving for at least sixty seconds (was she making sure I was fast asleep?). Then I heard her quietly scooping up her clothes and heading out the bedroom door, closing it behind her as soundlessly as possible.

I counted to sixty before silently getting out of bed. I pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, relieved that the bedroom blinds were partly open and the room half-lit by moonlight. I waited another five minutes, standing absolutely still, my eyes focused on the second hand of my watch. When the three hundred seconds had passed, I crept toward the closed bedroom door. But during those five motionless minutes, I tossed aside Bubriski’s directive to squat down and put my eye to the keyhole. To do so would be to spy, to engage in the surreptitious. Instead I just opened the door as quietly as possible.

There was Petra, leaning over the kitchen table. My work light was now focused down upon several transcript pages that had been spread out across the sanded pine surface. And she was using a tiny camera to photograph each page. For several moments I didn’t move. Even though I expected this from the moment I felt her get up and leave the bed, the shock of seeing her engaged in this “work” . . . all I could do was stand there and watch everything disintegrate. Love is, among other things, about hope. Hope is such a fragile entity—so charged with meaning, so delicately balanced on the frontier between great possibility and an even greater sense of loss—that you always fear the moment when you have definitive, concrete proof that things are now hopeless.

“You need to leave,” I heard myself saying.

Petra was so caught unaware by the sound of my voice that she lost her balance, breaking her fall by hitting the table with her hand and sending the lamp crashing to the ground, its bulb smashing on impact.

“Thomas . . . ,” she whispered.

“Get out,” I said, my voice still quiet.

“There is an explanation for all this.”

“I know there is. You work for them, don’t you?”

“Thomas . . .”

“Don’t you?” I now shouted.

She put her hand to her mouth, her eyes filling up with tears.

“You have to let me explain.”

“No, I don’t. Because you’ve betrayed me, you’ve betrayed us, you’ve betrayed everything.”

I could hear her strangle a cry in her throat.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“And you were with another man this weekend in Hamburg.”

Now it was she who looked as if she had been slapped across the face.

“How did you—?”

“
Know
? That’s my business. But I found out. Just as I found out that you’ve been fucking him all the time that you were telling me—”

“You are the man I love, Thomas. And you have to let me—”

“What?
Explain?
Give me some excuse
why
you had to
service
that evil little monster?”

“Please,
please,
let me try to—”

“Did you fucking hear me?” I screamed. “I want you out of here, out of my life
now
.”

When she came toward me, weeping, her arms open, repeating just one word,
“Please . . . please . . . please,”
I found myself edging into the sort of irrational anger where all past grievances—all the accumulated personal betrayals dating back to childhood—coalesced into a rage that I had never experienced before, a rage that terrified me. But I couldn’t apply the brakes, couldn’t quell the fury that propelled me toward her, Petra crying wildly, cowering in a corner as I scooped up the transcript, flung it all at her, yelling:

“Take it, take the fucking thing! You’ll probably get the Order of Fucking Lenin for it!”

“Please . . . please . . . please . . . ,” she cried again, the words hardly getting out.

“You destroy everything, and you want fucking mercy?
Out
.”

As I screamed that last word, I lashed out, flinging a kitchen chair across the room, watching her howl with grief as she still managed to scrabble together all the pages of the transcript.

“You see! You see!” I shrieked at her as I saw her gather up the pages. “You’ve got what you wanted, now fuck off and . . .”

She raced for her shoulder bag, stuffing the camera and the pages into it, then ran for the door, hysterical, frightened, crying uncontrollably. The door slammed behind her with a huge thud. I went charging to the window. The rage still in full throttle, I pulled the cord, lowering the blinds immediately, sending whatever operative posted outside the agreed signal that she was coming downstairs. That action—it was if I had given the firing squad the order to shoot—instantly sent me in a different direction, as I started barreling down the stairs, yelling at Petra to stop, to wait, to . . .

What was I thinking? I had no idea, except that having gone mad with fury I now suddenly found myself overwhelmed by the realization that I had acted irrationally, logic scrambled in the middle of wrath, so enraged at her that I didn’t even let her explain. And now . . .

I ran as fast as I could, slamming myself against the main door of the apartment, careening out into the darkened street, screaming Petra’s name as I saw her being bundled into a car by two men in suits. As I raced toward the car, which was now pulling away at speed, yelling at them to stop, to let me explain, someone stepped out of the shadows and, with a fast right to my stomach, sent me flying toward the pavement. As my knees hit the concrete, I was suddenly yanked up by the collar and found myself face-to-face with Bubriski.

“The fuck are you doing?” he said.

“You didn’t say you were going to arrest her on the street!” I yelled. “You said you were going to use her to get—”

His fist slammed again into my stomach. This time he hauled me up, dragged me inside the lobby of my building, and pushed me against a wall, hissing:

“You shut up
now
unless you want to end up in indefinite custody, and I am totally fucking serious about that.
Understand
?”