Secret Father (41 page)

Let go? Let go of Michael? At the fresh thought of my newly unyielding son, I had to sit. I lowered my haunches onto the cool marble ledge of the counter.
Michael, where are you?
I addressed this second question to the man with his back to me, aware of it as my first question. Two nights ago, at the beginning of this story, it was a question of physical whereabouts, but it had become a question of the interior geography across which we are chased by ghosts.
Michael, where are you?

Here in this city,
came the answer, this city of ghosts.

And are you here in flight from me?

That was a question—
how you flee from me!
—that I never knew to put to his mother, but I should have.

Edie, what about me made you run?

And there it was, a connection too blatant even for me to miss: Edie's flight from me had literally killed her, and wasn't a replay of that,
with you, Michael,
what terrified me now? Michael running from my anger, like Edie.
You killed her, Dad.
That was what he had been saying to me in every way but words.

This stranger just sat on the edge of his counter, looking away from me.

And how, I wondered, had the unknown woman in the other room come so surely to the knowledge of what I was doing, of who I was, of the fear that made me dangerous, but only to those I loved?

 

An impossible train of thought. To stop it, I stood and took my suit coat off, rolled my left shirtsleeve, reached inside the shower curtain, and shut the water off.

I found a towel, and as I dried my forearm and hand, I was determined to keep my gaze away from the man in the mirrors. Instead it fell, quite by accident, on Charlotte's leather bag, which still sat beside the ashtray on the dressing table. On the lurch of a wrong impulse, I dropped the towel and went for the bag. I opened its mouth fully, and there, atop a billfold, compact case, change purse, and a welter of other womanly things, was the slip of paper she had been handed at the desk, still folded, still unread.

Her request of me, that I "let go"—what is the opposite of my letting go?

This is. I reached into the bag and took the paper and unfolded it and read what was written there. The block letters with a slight backward slant read, "Do not forget that I am your V & V now." And it was signed "D." At the top of the paper was an abbreviated version of the hotel letterhead. At the bottom, near the right-hand corner, was the notation "1145" and a pair of initials, an operator. A phone message, therefore.

I folded the note and started to put it back into her bag, but that would seal this as a despicable act of snooping, and then I would find it impossible to remain in her presence, having done such a thing. Unless, of course, I could blame it on the stranger in the mirror.

And so, as though I were her page—odd word, that girl Kit had used it; "Faulkner's page"—I carried the folded slip of paper into the bedroom.

At first I was startled because the room seemed vacant to me, Charlotte gone, not on the bed, not on the settee, not in either of its companion chairs. Startled, on the way to panicked, that she had gone out into the wilds of the city without me.

Then I saw her, a dark form sitting upright on the floor in the far corner, a dozen paces beyond the furniture, beyond the French doors, which were still closed over with the drapery. She was as far from the unilluminated but in all ways electric chandelier as it was possible to get in that room. The light from the small bedside lamp, with its cloaking amber hat, did nothing to dispel the shadows across the room, and I could not see, until moving closer, that she had her long legs drawn up under her skirt, her elbows on her knees, her fingers spread to form a cradle for her forehead. She had unfastened her hair, and its free downpour screened the sides of her face. As I approached, she unfolded herself to lean back into the angle where the walls met. Her auburn hair now brushed her shoulders, and I remembered that this was how I had first seen her yesterday morning, her hair still damp from the shower.

Despite her air of gravity, or because of it, there was something regal about her; the corner into which she leaned could have been a throne. With her gaze on the middle distance and whatever figments floated in it, she wore her patrician hauteur like purple.

I walked to the French doors and stood over her in silence. When my eyes had adjusted to the shadows, I could see how her cream-colored blouse subtly outlined the contours of her breasts, and my mind went to the burnished folds of her nightgown, the aroma of the fabric, which was her aroma.

She looked up at me, her face expressionless.

I held the paper down to her without comment—I, the page, the squire.

And she took it. In that corner there was not enough light to read, and so, crooking a finger in the drapery, I pulled it back slightly to allow a wedge of sunlight to slice down upon her, a stage effect. She brought her hand to her brow. A million motes of dust floated in the sail-shaped brightness, like the figments she had been staring at before, her vision missing nothing.

As she unfolded the note, I felt appalled that I had read it first, even though its message meant nothing to me. I had to look away now, as if belatedly, to honor her privacy. If she noticed, she'd have seen it as a hollow gesture, shamelessly after the fact. Reading her mail. Sniffing her garments. What was I becoming here?

I looked through the drapery opening to the view outside, restricted as it was. As it happened, the small segment of cityscape that presented itself was centered on the Lindenhof, across and up the Ku'damm. The impression the Lindenhof and other buildings had made before, when we stood on the balcony, was of offices closed for Sunday. But now my eyes, as if newly trained, went right to a window where, behind the olive sheen, there were lights. I saw a flash of movement, and then I saw what might have been a man standing and looking out, a pair of men, one of them stocky, looking this way. And was that flash a reflection from binoculars?

Hans Krone.

The Commercial Bank had taken four floors of the Lindenhof, well up in the building, perhaps there. Krone's office—there! Krone's office overlooking the hotel room he had arranged for me.

Krone, my Virgil. What a fool I was, a self-important ass to have thought myself Dante. Did Dante condemn his Beatrice by asking her to trust his vain foolishness? Krone, no Virgil, was Judas! Binoculars! A bolt of self-loathing rose in my throat like bile. If Krone is Judas, I asked myself, then who are you? Jesus Christ, indeed.

Having registered all of this without moving, I let the drapery fall. I welcomed the return of shadows.

Looking down at Charlotte, I almost said, You are right, right about everything.

But she had lowered her face onto her knees. The slip of paper was on the floor beside her, open.

Her shoulders were moving in the gentle tide of her inaudible sobbing. I went down on one knee and put my hand on the back of her neck, on the angle of skin that lay uncovered where her hair had fallen away to either side. Through that pink membrane, I felt the current of her blood flowing, warm. And I felt the slow ebbing of her grief, whatever it was.

After some moments, I swung around to sit beside her on the floor, easing my weight against the wall, inviting hers to shift against me, which, with a movement as natural as gravity, it did. With one arm, I held her in silence for a long time.

 

Her head at rest on my shoulder, her tears dry on my shirt.

It was a simple matter to bring my face down, sheltering her face from the room, my mouth beside her ear, her mouth beside mine.

"V and V?" I asked, a whisper. There seemed to be no question of our being overheard; no question, either, of her not answering.

"
Verhältnis und Verwandten,
" she whispered in reply.

I had no idea how the words were spelled—for this writing, I look it up—yet they struck a familiar chord, as if I'd studied them in my Berlitz. "What is that?" I asked.

"An expression. In English you say 'kith and kin.'"

"David is telling you that—"

"He is my family now."

"Emphasis on
he
."

"Yes."

"That doesn't go without saying?"

"I told you. I never left Berlin, never really left. I thought I did. David thought I did. But I never left Berlin. That is the revelation of
ersten Mai,
1961."

"And 1945? The curse of Rick's father—Ulrich's father. You said that before, 'curse.'What curse? That he was a Communist? And then the Communists became the enemy? What?"

"Paul—"

"Were you a Communist, Charlotte?"

She laughed nearly out loud, a burst of air in my ear. "Of course not."

"'Soviet files,'you said. You came here to learn what had happened to Wolf, and your American found Soviet files for you, which answered your questions. And Sohlmann, the Stasi official killed at Schloss Pankow this week, how does he—?"

"Paul!"

"You've shown me the pieces, Charlotte. Now show me how they fit."

"Let go, Paul. Let go of everything. If you let go, we can just be here together.
Be
here together. Can that not be enough?"

"No past? No future?"

"Not until..."She hesitated, then said, "Tomorrow."

"And David?"

"David is my rescuer. He gave me milk for my child, and I will always owe him that. He finished my story for me, too. But there is the problem. I never finished the story myself. He took me from Berlin, but that was not enough. David and I are like you and Michael, which is why I know what Michael feels. What David wants is impossible, and that truth comes clear only here. If there is a curse, that is what it is."

"Berlin."

"I am in Berlin and David is not. It was always thus. I confessed this to you. I wanted to love him, my rescuer. I tried to love him all these years, but..."

She fell silent. I supplied the line she had offered me: "'Real love, compared to fantasy, is a harsh and dreadful thing.'"

"And now David is hurt, very hurt."

"You 'confessed' to him?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"Last night. By telephone. That is why he sent the message. Why I did not read it."

"A worried father, like me. A worried husband."

"But with nothing he can do. Everything is out of David's hands. And like you, David finds this very difficult."

"And all of this, between you, is because of Wolf? Wolf is what keeps you 'in Berlin'?" I felt her stiffen next to me. "Because you still love him, your Leipzig professor, your honored war hero, your son's father, even if he is dead. Or perhaps
because
he is dead."

Abruptly, Charlotte pulled back. I felt a rebuke coming, for pressing her again.

But I was wrong. She brought her face to mine, our noses nearly touching. She put her hands on each of my cheeks, clutching my bones. She looked into me, a gaze, not a stare. "Paul," she said in the whisper that had become our vernacular. "Wolf died a terrible death in a terrible time. He was at Moabit prison, yes. That is his name on the bronze tablet at Schloss Pankow, yes. But Wolf has nothing to do with love—mine or anyone's. I will say nothing more about Wolf except this. He is not what makes me like Michael or like you—I am like you both; I see how
both
of you feel—because your wife was very different. Your Edie. I know that."

"What do you know?"

"That you and she punished each other as a way to avoid punishing your crippled son. What you did, you did for love."

"And you and Wolf?"

"Leave it at this: my dead husband was nothing like your dead wife."

"But you and I...?"

She shrugged against me. "Similar, perhaps."

"You are like me because the past has its grip on you."

"We do the gripping, Paul."

"I see that, because of you. And believe it or not, I am letting go because of you."

"As am I. Because of
you.
When I turned to you in the car, it was not only for Krone. Here is my real confession. It was for you."

Our kiss then belonged to both of us.

As did the quick passion with which we tried to swallow each other. Soon we were pulling at clothes, tumbling across the stretch of bare hardwood that was the margin between the wall and the thick, soft carpet against which we brushed. I was a man out of practice, and I recall that it came as a surprise to me that Charlotte's bra fastened at the front. We both laughed when we had to stop so that she could unclasp it.

The sight of her free white breasts brought a gasp from the well of my throat. I lost that sight as she pressed against me, pulling off the last of my shirt—the shirt that she had bought for me. Then she was unhooking my belt. Then we were naked, and I was between her legs, over her, in her, aware of every bodily sensation, including the breath-stopping pressure of her thighs at my waist as her long, smooth legs locked around me, her legs which so kept the pace of our rocking that it was impossible to say who set it.

I forgot that there were reasons to stifle our noises, and reasons not to. The sounds Charlotte made as she approached her succession of hills—not only the guttural rapidity of breathing, but the timed slaps of her open hand onto the floor beside us, a rider's whip hand—were a next level of pleasure to me. That pleasure was like a beloved summer house I was returning to after winter, and in one of its rooms I met an old envy, familiar from a thousand times with Edie, how a man can only marvel at the supreme self-possession of a woman's ecstasy, her lover a partner, yes, but an awed bystander, too.

To Charlotte and me, if I may presume to report for both of us, our raucous coming together provided the perfect release; was an exquisite expression of need and longing; a transitory but consoling fulfillment of both; an act of love, even, though the word was nowhere in the air between us. An act, while it lasted, of simple purity, pure simplicity. But oh, the sounds! The sounds surely suggested something else. Not once did I wonder, as she grew louder and louder, if, after all, she was thinking of Krone and his knot of Stasi listeners, to whom our sweet, redemptive passion could have been only fucking.