The Moment (32 page)

“You mean, you won’t stay for lunch?” Petra asked. “I’ve got a spaghetti sauce brewing upstairs.”

“Really?” I asked.

“I just thought, with Alaistair coming home, it would be nice if we could all sit down and have lunch together.”

“I’m liking you even more by the minute,” Alaistair said.

“So I’ll go and put the spaghetti on now,” she said. “And Alaistair, you’ll see I picked up some bread and cheese and milk and coffee for you.”

“Marry this woman,” Alaistair told me.

“I probably will,” I said, staring right at Petra.

“I’d best go upstairs. I hope you can stay for lunch, Mehmet.”

“Not possible.”

“See you soon then,” she said. Squeezing my hand she whispered: “I’ll hold you to what you just said,” then headed upstairs.

“Aren’t you the lucky bastard,” Alaistair said. “She
is
lovely.”

“I agree.”

“And I hope you didn’t ask her to make lunch for me.”

“Some people are actually just nice,” I said, glancing over at Mehmet.

“I’m aware of that,” Alaistair said. “And some people are foolish enough to stay with the wrong person.”

Mehmet’s response to this was to shake his head several times, then mutter “I have to go,” and head to the door. Alaistair immediately chased after him. I took this as a cue to head upstairs. As I reached my doorway I heard something that I had never heard: the sound of Mehmet getting angry, shouting something at Alaistair in his gruff German and Alaistair trying to soothe him. As I opened the door Petra was standing in front of the stove, a huge pot of spaghetti on the boil next to a most aromatic pan of sauce. She immediately came over and put her arms around me:

“It sounds like Alaistair said the wrong thing.”

“That he did.”

“We’ll never say the wrong things to each other, will we?”

“Of course, we will. But then we’ll apologize profusely and make mad, passionate love and . . .”

She kissed me, and we stumbled backward against a wall, Petra throwing one leg around me, sticking her hand into my jeans, and whispering:

“If it wasn’t for the spaghetti, I’d take you right now.”

“To hell with the spaghetti.”

“But Alaistair will be arriving any moment.”

“To hell with Alaistair.”

As we stumbled toward the bedroom, there was the sound of knuckles rapping on the door.

“
Scheisse
,” Petra said, straightening out her clothes and rushing to a spaghetti pot that was about to erupt, while I rebuttoned my jeans and staggered over to the door. As I opened it I found Alaistair outside. His eyes were red.

“You okay?” I asked.

“No,” he said, coming inside. “Trust me to ruin everything within five minutes of getting home.”

“What happened?” Petra asked.

“I pushed Mehmet over the edge, and he just stormed out and said he wasn’t coming back.”

“That could just be an overreaction,” I said.

“No, it’s been building up to this for a very long time.”

“Let him calm down. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Wishful thinking. The truth is, I’ve lost him.”

“I think you could use a drink,” I said.

Alaistair rubbed his hand against his very wet eyes. I’d never seen him quite like this before—so open, so vulnerable, so sad.

“I could use twenty drinks.”

I uncorked the cheap Italian white that Petra and I always drank. Alaistair downed two glasses quickly with two accompanying cigarettes. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, he discarded the sorrow and amused us over lunch with tales of the art world, bombarding Petra with questions about her painter friends in Prenzlauer Berg and impressing her with his knowledge of East German artists while downing a bottle of wine by himself before suddenly announcing:

“Oh fuck, I forgot my bloody methadone.”

Then he roared down the stairs, clearly drunk.

“Well, that was a first,” Petra said.

“Yes, he does tend to deal in extremity.”

“I was talking about never having had lunch with someone before who had to dash off and take his methadone.”

“At least he doesn’t shoot up anymore.”

“I actually like him. He is mad and charming and evidently desperate for love and unable to receive it.”

“That sounds pretty accurate to me. But I am amazed you gleaned all that over one lunch.”

“I was married to a man like Alaistair. Not gay like him. Life was complicated enough between us. But very much a man whose entire life was an extended public performance. Someone who had to take over a room as soon as he walked into it. Who loved to blurt out completely outrageous things, and would frequently tell people what he thought of them without any regard whatsoever for the consequence. Of course, you tell me that Alaistair is highly disciplined, that even when he was using heroin he did so in a very controlled, orderly way. The thing about Jurgen . . . he had brilliance galore. He was wildly cerebral, wildly imaginative, and fantastically entertaining, which, I suppose, made him a very attractive man at the outset.

“But then, once we were settled together, once the shine came off his act, he was impossible to be around. Especially as he was a profoundly talented and undisciplined man—and one who decided to take on the powers-that-be.

“If there was one great rule to life in the GDR it was that you had to somehow find an accommodation with the system, work out a way of paying lip service to the strictures under which we all lived, but also create a private world which the authorities couldn’t really penetrate, as much as they wanted to.

“I thought we had created that sort of world for ourselves in Prenzlauer Berg. Our very own Ossie version of Greenwich Village. Unlike all those struggling artists in nineteen-sixties New York we had the one great benefit afforded all citizens of the GDR: we paid nothing in rent, we didn’t have to be serious about our jobs, we could allow the state to fund our bohemian existence as long as we didn’t question the raison d’être of the regime. But that was the problem with Jurgen. He wasn’t satisfied living a relatively easy life. He had to be the eternal provocateur. Even though he wasn’t exactly against the regime, the fact that they banned one of his plays—largely because they thought it so extreme in its anger at everything—sent him into a spiral. I told him repeatedly: write something clever, but performable. If you are subtle and intelligent about it you can say all you want, but not land yourself in further trouble. But he would never listen to me. I even pleaded with what few good friends he had left to talk sense to him. But there was something rather monomaniacal about Jurgen. A jazz pianist we knew—and who had been something akin to Jurgen’s older brother for about ten years—told me he felt my husband had turned into a kamikaze, and was determined to crash and obliterate himself and those closest to him.”

As she paused and reached for her cigarettes, I asked, “And did he do just that?”

“Absolutely. He also took me down with him, even though I was someone who had no interest whatsoever in the crazed political games he played toward the end. It didn’t matter. Guilt by association is a major offense in the GDR, especially if the ‘association’ is someone with whom you share your bed.”

“Was he arrested?”

“What do you think?”

“Were you arrested?”

“That’s another conversation,” she said. “And now I need you to hold me.”

I came over to where she was sitting and picked her up and walked us over to the sofa. We fell onto it and lay there for a very long time, simply holding on to each other, saying nothing. Eventually Petra broke the silence.

“I hate talking about the past.”

“But it’s what shapes us—and anyway I want to know everything about you.”

“And I want to shed everything to do with the last year of my life over there. Eradicate it all from my memory.”

“It was that awful?”

She just shrugged, then said:

“You know that Robert Grave’s book,
Goodbye to All That
. I keep telling myself to follow the advice of the title. Slam the door on that whole episode of my life and not look back. This is why you are so precious to me. Because for the first time in years I actually see a future that is not tragic.”

Interestingly, after this conversation the subject of her husband, of whatever sad or wrenching things befell her before coming west, was dropped. It wasn’t as if we stayed away from the subject of our lives before we met each other, or that we didn’t touch on difficult things we had weathered. Rather, Petra never seemed to return to that state of bleakness which seemed to envelop her whenever she mentioned her ex-husband or all those things that happened “over there” that she still couldn’t bring herself to discuss. And the reason she was no longer dwelling on desolate memories of the recent bleak past was, I sensed, the fact that she was happy. And because our life together had an ease and a rhythm that were simply matchless.

With a book to write, I spent most of my days loitering with intent around the city. I used a letter from my publishers in New York as a bona fide to talk my way into spending a day with one of the US Army guys who manned the checkpoint on the American Sector side of Checkpoint Charlie. I had a fascinating afternoon with a Swiss architectural historian based in Berlin. He knew everything there was to know about the bricks-and-mortar legacy of Albert Speer and while also revealing that his wife had just run off with an émigré Bulgarian poet who wrote “unreadable modernist East European shit.” Just as the Army guy dropped the fact that he had a wife and child back in some Kentucky hole that he wasn’t planning to see again. Just as I got talking with an elderly black American jazz pianist, Bobby Blakely, who played every night in the bar of the Hotel Kempinski. He’d been living in the same small room near Spandau since coming over in the late 1950s and was one of those rootless expatriates who had no ties that bind, few friends, but had never missed one of his six-night-a-week gigs at the Kempinski since first landing the job in 1962.

These tales interested me, not just because every life is, in its own way, a novel—but also because, little by little, I was beginning to realize that the way to build up an idiosyncratic portrait of Berlin was through the stories of the people into whose path I threw myself. Just as I also knew that I would write about Omar and the Café Istanbul and would probably reinvent Alaistair, turning him into a lifelong Londoner, making Mehmet perhaps Iranian, and setting the scene of the apartment we shared in another corner of Kreuzberg, maybe even in that faceless noman’s-land where Petra lived.

Of course, everything to do with my existence with Petra also went into my notebook. Was I looking upon it as material? I told myself at the time that keeping such a close record was just a way of articulating this most important sea change in my life. But the truth was a little more basic than that. If you write,
everything
is material. And part of me felt that, by getting it all down, I could also convince myself that, yes, this was real, that, yes, I had met the love of my life.

I would wake up every morning to find Petra beside me and simply stare at her, still asleep, marveling. And then she would stir awake and look at me and smile and touch my face and always whisper, “It’s you.” Once she had finally gone off to work I would spend the balance of the morning writing, then join Fitzsimons-Ross in what became a new ritual for us—an early lunch at the Café Istanbul. The day after he came home from the hospital, he went out and reordered all the necessary brushes and paints, spending hours forcing the man in a nearby artist supply shop (his “paint meister” as he called him) to remix a multiple palette of blues until he achieved the shades of azure, aquamarine, cobalt, and turquoise that Alaistair demanded. Three newly stretched canvases also arrived in his studio space. On his third morning home, I wandered downstairs to see Alaistair, his back to me, headphones on his head, a dripping paintbrush in one hand, circling the canvas like a matador approaching his malevolent prey. Then, in a flash, a streak of cobalt blue was slashed across the canvas. From my hidden vantage point halfway up the stairs I watched as the white of the canvas disappeared under a controlled assault of blue. Watching Alaistair diving headfirst back into the work, all I could think was: he has more courage than most men I know. Resiliency is something you only realize you possess when you demand it of yourself.

“If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m three hundred deutsche marks better off a week, I’d jump back on the smack tomorrow,” he said loudly one lunchtime, in earshot of Omar and his staff at the Istanbul.

“Why don’t you say that a little more loudly so the cop outside can hear you?” I said.

“The last time I looked, you couldn’t get busted for expressing an illicit desire. Anyway, the city fathers in Berlin believe junkies give the place a certain edgy cachet. In fact, they should really pay us to shoot up in picturesque locations. And you are now hearing one of the side effects of methadone: a need to spout rubbish at all times. As in: how does it feel to still be so disgustingly in love?”