The Moment (56 page)

“I should be so lucky,” I said.

Those books kept me sane during my first weeks in Kreuzberg. Occasionally, I would go out at night and see a movie or sit alone in a bar where some jazz group was playing, nursing a vodka and fending off any man who tried to have a conversation with me. But largely, outside of work, I sat at home and listened to music and read, all the while wondering when
he
would be in contact, when everything would begin to change.

That happened my fourth week at Radio Liberty. I was heading out of the office and into the U-Bahn station when a fat man in a green parka with a fur hood bumped into me. As he did, he thrust a card into my hand and then moved on. I pocketed the card immediately, waiting until I was home to read it:

Meet me tomorrow at six p.m., Hotel Claussmann. Room 12. Londoner Strasse.

I stared at the card for a very long time, knowing what would happen if I didn’t show up.

I had no choice. I had to meet that man in that hotel room. And I had to do whatever he asked of me.

* * *

Londoner Strasse was a shabby street in an outlying area near Tegel Airport. Dreary apartment blocks. Scruffy streets in which trash had gone uncollected for some days. Some fast food cafés. Graffiti. Bad lighting. A sense of neglect. Sleet falling. And a man asleep at the reception desk of the Hotel Claussmann. He had a heavily pockmarked face. As he snored, an emphysemic wheeze was discernible. The hotel lobby was painted a garish maroon and had a carpet that was heavily stained and dirty. This was a cheap hotel. Very cheap.

I sidestepped the desk clerk and went up a flight of stairs to discover a narrow corridor, lit by fluorescent tubes. Room 12 was at the end of the hall. I knocked on it lightly, hoping against hope there would be no answer. But a thick voice said:

“Ja?”

“It’s Dussmann,” I said.

The door opened, and there he was. The fat man who bumped into me at the U-Bahn station yesterday. He was short, around five foot six, with a significant potbelly and a half-shaven face with a decidedly oily patina. He was in some indeterminate corner of middle age—his graying hair and brown teeth possibly making him appear more the wrong side of fifty. He had a cigarette in his mouth when I walked in. He was stripped down to a dirty white T-shirt that stretched over his distended stomach and a pair of yellowed Y-fronts.

“Shut the door,” he ordered.

“If I’m getting you at a bad time . . . ,” I said.

“Shut the fucking door,” he ordered, his voice level but very threatening.

I shut the door. The room was small and as shabby as the rest of the hotel. A sagging double bed, a naked lightbulb suspended from the ceiling, floral wallpaper peeling off the walls, a stench of mildew and cigarette smoke and male sweat.

“Anyone follow you here?” he asked.

“I didn’t notice.”

“In the future you notice.”

“Sorry.”

“Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“Take off your clothes.”

Instantly I thought:
flee
. He gauged this immediately, as he said:

“You leave now, you can forget ever seeing your cute little son again. I will make an anonymous call to those
Bundesnachrichtendienst
spooks who debriefed you and tell them you’re a double agent. And if you don’t think I’m serious . . .”

He reached over to the scarred metal table by the bed and picked up an envelope, tossing its contents out onto the bed. I gasped when I saw a half dozen snapshots of Johannes. All recent. All of him being held up and clutched by a couple. Both fair haired and young and smiling. The man in the formal uniform of a Stasi officer. I immediately dived for the photographs, but the man grabbed my arm and wrenched it behind my back with such force that I let out a scream which he silenced by pulling me toward him and slapping his free hand across my mouth.

“You
never
do anything without my permission.
Never
. You understand?”

Now he yanked my arm up so high it felt like he was about to dislocate it. I nodded agreement many times. He let me go, simultaneously throwing me down on the bed on top of the photographs. I jumped up immediately, not wanting to crease them.

“Now take off your clothes,” he said.

I hesitated, still wanting to flee.

“Now.”

Awkwardly I took off my jacket, my sweater, my skirt, my tights, my underwear. I covered my breasts with my arms, shielding them.

“On the bed,” he ordered.

I reached down to first tidy up the photographs.

“Did I give you permission to do that?”

I began to sob.

“You stop that crying now,” he hissed.

I worked hard at stifling my sobs.

“May I please pick up the photographs, sir?”

“You’re learning. Yes, you may.”

I scooped up the snapshots, looking for a moment at one of Johannes alone, clutching a teddy bear.

“Did I give you permission to look at the photographs?” he yelled.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, scooping the rest up and dropping them on the side table.

“Now on the bed.”

The mattress sagged as I lay down on it, creaking loudly. I curled up into a fetal position, wanting so much at that moment to simply die.

“On your back,” he yelled.

I did as ordered.

He approached me, pulling my legs apart with his two hands. Then he yanked down his Y-fronts and licked his hand, touching the head of his erect penis with it. I shut my eyes tightly as he barged into me. I was dry and so desperately tense that it felt as if he was ripping directly into me. I lay there, inert, as he thrust in and out. Happily—and that’s the wrong adverb to use here, but the only one that comes to mind—he never tried to kiss me. And he was fast. A minute or so of his thrusts and then he came in me with a groan that sounded more like an expectoration. He turned flaccid within moments. He stood up almost immidiately, pulled up his Y-fronts, and ordered me to get dressed, then said:

“We are going to meet twice a week—and I am going to fuck you both times. If you don’t want to do that, just tell me now—and I will get word to East Berlin that you want the adoption of Johannes to be permanent.”

“I don’t want that.”

“Then you will do exactly what I request. If you behave like a good operative, our masters back home will get a decent report from me about you—and that should help your case. Of course, if you don’t follow orders . . .”

And orders involve fucking you.

“I’ll follow orders,” I said, thinking:
I have no cards to play here
.

“Then put your clothes back on.”

As I got dressed, the man reached for his packet of Camels and lit one up. As an afterthought he tossed the packet onto the bed, saying:

“Take one.”

“Thank you.”

“You on the pill?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“You get knocked up, you deal with it.”

“My period’s due tomorrow.”

“Then you go on the pill this week. Understood?”

I nodded.

Once I was fully dressed again, he opened a wardrobe and pulled out a cheap-looking suitcase. He squatted down and flipped it open. He pulled out a small zipped bag.

“This is for you,” he said, handing it to me. “Go ahead, open it.”

Again I did as ordered. Inside the bag was a tiny camera—so small it could easily fit in the palm of my right hand.

“This is the tool of your trade. Also in the bag you will find twenty-four miniature rolls of film, each with sixteen exposures. Your task is simple. You photograph both the original copy and the translation you make of everything handed to you. You find a way of secreting this camera on your person—and you bring the film back here to me twice a week. You also work out a way of getting up here without being followed.”

“What makes you think I’m being followed?”

“You’re a new arrival. They always keep a close eye on recent political émigrés. Why do you think I waited a month before contacting you? I was simply making sure they had reached a moment where they were becoming less vigilant about tracking you everywhere. But we still can’t be too cautious. So you must find a route that will lose them.”

“Who’s to say they didn’t follow me up here tonight?”

“Because we have our sources and you are now considered, by them, to be clean. Even so, we will never meet just here. And the way I contact you will be very simple. There is a bar near you in Kreuzberg called Der Schlüssel. A dive—and patronized by a young, druggy clientele. It is atrocious at night, but just about tolerable during the day. You will make it your local. I want you to stop in there at least five times a week for a beer, a coffee. You will always go to the bathroom while there. In the one and only stall in the ladies’, you will notice a loose floor tile just to the right of the toilet. I will always leave a note under this tile, stating the time and place of our next rendezvous. It will always be two days in advance. You must memorize the details, then flush the card away. You must always make our appointments promptly. You must always bring the film with you. And I will always expect new film from you twice a week.”

He then gave me a fast lesson in how to load the film, how to photograph the documents, and how to hide the camera within my clothes.

“Best in the crotch of your jeans when you are coming to work. There’s no metal detector at Radio Liberty, but the security people there do make random searches of bags and desks. So you should only bring the camera two, three times a week and photograph your work at that time. The station is usually working on everything but the news a week or so in advance, so it is critical that we have your film promptly. Do remember: failure to make our appointments, failure to have photographed all the translations you have worked on, will be reported back. You do not want that, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“You really are learning. Maybe you will convert to being a true believer—which, trust me, is the fastest way back to your son.”

“Whatever it takes, sir,” I said. “Whatever it takes.”

“I’m Haechen, by the way. Helmut Haechen. It’s not my real name, but it’s what I adopted years ago. Who needs a past,
ja
? You check the toilet at Der Schlüssel in two days—and there will be instructions where we meet next. Now get out of here.”

* * *

As soon as I was out on the street, I doubled over and began to retch. I must have vomited for a good five minutes, sinking down to my knees on the slushy pavement, sobbing and spewing at the same time, feeling beyond violated. A man—elderly, frail, but with deeply alert eyes—came by and asked if I needed his help. His decency only made me cry louder. Instead of talking in the sort of well-meaning clichés—
It’s not the end of the world now, is it?
—he did something so incredibly humane, so profoundly powerful. He just put one of his hands on my shoulder and kept it there until I was able to bring myself under control. When I made it to my feet, he touched my face with his gloved hand. His eyes brimming with concern and (I sensed) the understanding of someone who had known life’s more extreme horrors, he uttered one simple word:

“Courage.”

I got home. I stripped off everything I was wearing. I took a shower so hot it almost scalded me. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe. I stared at myself long and hard in the mirror, trying to see if the woman looking back at me—with her red, exhausted eyes, her expression of deep shock and fear etched everywhere on her face—could provide me with some sort of way out of a nightmare that I knew would just deepen with time.

Call Frau Jochum, call Herr Ullmann. Beg for mercy . . . and never see Johannes again.

And if you do everything Haechen asks you . . . if you spread your legs for him twice a week . . .

They will have to reunite me with Johannes. They will owe me that. They will have to play fair.

The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

But when you have no other options—when any decision you make will lead to grief—what other choice do you have but to hold on to the lie that might miraculously transform itself into the denouement you spend your days pleading for?

I’ve never had a religious impulse in my life. But tonight, passing by a Catholic church on the way home, I had the urgent desire to go inside and find a priest and lay bare my soul to him and ask for some sort of divine guidance.

Can prayers be answered, Father?
I would ask him afterward. No doubt he’d tell me that miracles do happen, that the hand of the Almighty Father works in mysterious ways.