The Things We Cherished (29 page)

At the elevator bank, they paused. Jack’s eyes met hers and despite all that had happened, she could not help but wonder if he wanted to come up again. But with Brian here there was no possibility of a repeat encounter. The elevator doors opened and Brian stood aside expectantly, waiting for her to enter. She could feel Jack’s gaze, sense his resentment, as she stepped inside. She turned back. It’s not like that, she wanted to tell him. She and Brian were just sharing an elevator, going to their separate floors. But the doors began to close.

“G’night, Charlotte,” Brian said fuzzily a minute later as the door opened at his floor. He stepped off, oblivious to what had just taken place.

She made her way to her room and closed the door, still stunned by Jack’s revelation. What would have happened if she had met Jack
first? Would they have been drawn together or would the timing have been just as wrong then as it was now? It was impossible to roll back the clock, to imagine not having fallen for Brian. That blinding, all-encompassing first love and the heartbreak that followed had become part of who she was, so inextricably linked to her identity and the story of her life that she could not disentangle them and get a clear picture of what might have been. No, she simply would not have been ready for Jack then, and he had the baroness and his own heartbreak to weather to make him who he was today.

And now? She turned the question over in her mind, considering. If she and Jack had been reunited under different circumstances, would it have worked? The question was a moot one. There was Brian and their history and this case, not to mention the fact that they lived on two separate continents, so their feelings, as undeniable as they were, would have to remain untapped, a great what-if in their lives. Perhaps that was better than trying it on and seeing that it really wasn’t what she thought.

As she undressed, she still wondered if there might be a knock at the door, Jack venturing up to see her. But he would not, she realized as she climbed into bed, push his way in where he feared he might not be wanted. She couldn’t help but listen for footsteps in the hallway, though, hoping until she fell asleep.

Sometime later, there was a pounding at the door. Jack, she thought, sitting up. Had he decided to come see her after all? Charlotte leapt to her feet, nearly stumbling, her head still fuzzy from the liquor.

She hurried to the door, opened it a crack. “Brian,” she said, wondering with a sense of déjà vu if it was morning and she had overslept. But this time he wasn’t dressed in his usual suit. Instead he wore sweatpants and a T-shirt and sported an unshaven jawline,
images from almost a decade ago that had no place here. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

He pushed past her into the room. “Wait, I’m not—” she began.

But Brian burst in like an oversized puppy, unable to contain his energy. “We got a call,” he announced breathlessly. “It’s from a woman in Italy and she claims to have proof that Roger is innocent.”

EAST BERLIN
,
1961

Anneke looked up from the beer stein she was drying. Across the bar, a group of students clustered around a table in the corner, laughing boisterously. One of the men lifted his head from the gathering. His eyes caught Anneke’s and for a second she thought he might smile, but he turned away quickly.

She had first seen him nearly two months earlier when he came in with his friends, and he had returned nightly with the group ever since. He was about twenty-two or so, she guessed, with shaggy black hair that curled at the collar and pale skin that reminded her of the porcelain tea set that sat on the Stossels’ mantelpiece. For weeks she had watched him when she was sure no one was looking, shivering when she got close to clear the table where he sat.

Anneke had taken the job at the bar the previous spring as a way to supplement her income and earn a few extra marks to help her mother pay the rent. It was little more than a ground-floor shop that had been converted, worn wooden tables and crude benches scattered throughout the room, a deer’s head mounted above the fireplace. The job was a welcome break from her position at the Stossels’, cleaning floors and polishing silver with only her mother
and the dour-faced cook Inge for company. Not that the actual work here, clearing tables and washing dishes, was so much better. But the crowd, a mix of bohemian artists and students from the nearby university who willingly consumed the
Schwarz bier
or whatever liquor was available without complaint, was livelier than any she had ever seen. The occasional snippet of political debate or gossip she overheard as she picked up the glasses almost made up for the fact that the clientele were notoriously bad tippers.

When it was almost eleven and the crowd had thinned, Anneke went reluctantly into the kitchen to collect the garbage. It was always the least favorite part of her night, not so much for the drudgery of the task itself, but because it meant the bar would soon close and she would have to return home.

As she carried the trash out into the darkness of the alleyway behind the bar, she heard a rustling sound. “Oh!” she exclaimed. Fearing a rat or worse, she jumped, dropping the bags. One opened as it hit the ground, scraps of food and soiled paper scattering across the pavement.

“Easy,” someone said through the darkness, a puff of smoke rising in the glow of the streetlight. A tiny shiver ran through her as she recognized the voice of the dark-haired young man from the conversations she had overheard in the bar. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

What was he doing out here, she wondered? Patrons smoked freely inside. “I wanted to get some air,” he added, answering her unspoken question.

Then better out front and not in the alley, which smelled of old food and urine, she wanted to say. He moved closer with the swiftness of a cat. “Let me help you.” He bent to pick up the spilled garbage she had nearly forgotten was there. The tip of his cigarette
gave off an acrid smell as he knelt and refilled the bag without any sign of hesitation or distaste. She dropped down, working beside him in silence.

“I’m Henryk,” he said when they finished, straightening in unison.

“Anneke.” They shook hands somewhat formally, and she was surprised that his fingers were as soft as the kid gloves Frau Stossel wore.

From the entrance to the bar there came a clattering and the portly silhouette of Herr Ders, the proprietor, filled the doorway. “I’ve got to go,” she whispered, and Henryk seemed to vanish before she could finish the sentence, a lingering hint of smoke the only indication that he had been there at all.

She walked back inside with a sinking feeling, certain that Henryk’s foray into the stench-filled alley had been a mistake and that the experience of helping her pick up garbage would ensure that he would never return. But the next night, as she stepped outside, she smelled the now-familiar perfume of his cigarette once more.

He held the pack out to her, an offering. Anneke shook her head. She had seen the way that smoking had drawn her mother’s once-beautiful mouth into a tight pucker, caused her voice to go raspy. “Are you a student at the university?” she ventured.

He nodded. “Yes. That is, I’m on sabbatical this semester.” She didn’t know what that was, but it sounded terribly intriguing. “Are you in school?”

She smiled inwardly, brushing her hair, which was a color she’d seen described in magazines as dishwater blond, from her face. People always took her for much younger than twenty. “I graduated two years ago.” She had managed to finish, fighting her mother’s insistence that she drop out at fifteen to earn a living, instead working nights and weekends to bring in money. “I would have loved to
study at the university.” Of course that had been out of the question. It was almost impossible for a woman from her background to become eligible for higher education under the state system.

“Someday you’ll be able to. Things will be different here,” Henryk declared. Anneke looked at him. He was talking of political change, throwing off the rulers and institutions that kept them in this God-awful state of economic depression while their fellow Berliners flourished just miles away on the other side of the newly constructed Wall.

But people in Anneke’s world did not dare to speak of such things. She had heard bits of conversation in the café, bold political statements made by Henryk’s friends or others like them. The remarks were always made with a touch of humor, though, just to make sure anyone who overheard—especially the Stasi agents and their spies, who were rumored to be everywhere—wouldn’t think they were serious. She generally attributed such talk to the beer and the bravado brought on by the anonymity of a large noisy room.

Henryk wasn’t joking now though, and he didn’t seem the slightest bit drunk. He spoke clearly, breaking the silence of the darkened alleyway with his words.

“What do you mean?” she ventured. Even the question felt daring, and it seemed as if the police might come and take them away at any second.

“It hasn’t always been this way,” he said. “All of this,” he waved his hands around his head, as though swatting at flies, “is just a phase. Governments change all the time and sometimes even for the better.”

Anneke paused to consider this. Though the present administration was all that she had ever known, she was aware on some level, of course, that there was a time before. When she had gone to school, the teachers made veiled references to the war and the
previous regime from which the Red Army had liberated them. But despite the colorful picture painted by the textbooks, it always seemed to Anneke that bad was replaced by worse—in the past fifty years they had gone from losing a war to the Nazis to another defeat to the Communists. “How?” she asked.

“The people have to make it happen,” he replied confidently. “We have to demand change.” A shiver passed through Anneke. People who spoke up like that wound up disappearing to who-knows-where, hushed whispers about their departure the only evidence they had been here at all. She had seen it with a printer whose name she had forgotten. Once when she had been at his shop picking up something for the Stossels, she had noticed him producing something else, a newspaper of some sort. She asked her mother about it later that night.

“Best to mind our own business,” Bronia had said. And she was right, because two months later the printer was gone.

A wave of admiration swept over her then. Henryk was so brave. She wanted to ask what the people had to do to bring about these changes. Surely sitting in bars talking wasn’t going to make things happen. But before she could speak, he ground out his cigarette. “I’ve got to go.” And he disappeared from the alley, leaving her to wonder if she had said something wrong, or if he had simply been bored.

That night she trudged home to the apartment she shared with her mother. The housing estate where they lived had been one of the earliest rebuilding projects of the new government in the years after the war, and the twenty thousand units were quickly filled by Berliners weary of sharing cramped quarters with relatives in the housing shortages that plagued the city following the devastation of the bombing raids. The original plans had touted parks and playgrounds and other amenities. But the development had
stagnated and the further improvements never came, and the land between the buildings remained barren and unpaved.

Anneke navigated the wooden planks that formed a bridge over the thick sea of muddy earth, still thinking about her conversation with Henryk, recalling what he had said about things changing, the opportunity for a better life. She had contemplated such things herself, of course. She wanted more than a few odd jobs pasted together, enough money to make it until the next time she got paid. But when she tried to picture what that might look like, the image was murky and indiscernible. In her wildest dreams, she did something working with books, in a library or perhaps a shop. In truth, there was little prospect for someone with her limited background and nonexistent resources. The most she’d been raised to expect was marriage to someone practical, like a pipe fitter or factory worker, who earned a passable living. She’d seen enough, though, to know that raising a bunch of kids and waiting for a man who came home drunk or angry or not at all was not for her. She’d rather carry on as she was, alone.