The Moment (53 page)

And so I must admit a chronological truth here. I am writing this four weeks after that first night I was handed over to Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann. Before tonight I never put pen to paper and attempted to assemble my thoughts about all that had happened to me, all that I had to hide. A day or so after I was brought to the West, Frau Ludwig had asked me if I wanted “writing materials.” Perhaps she understood—given everything I’d been through—the need to write things down, to set out my version of events on the page and, in the process, try to sort out my feelings about everything . . . even vent my anger, my agony at having lost my son, and the fury I felt at Stenhammer never telling me, before my departure, about Jurgen’s suicide . . . if it really was a suicide. But he knew that to inform me of that before I left would have been destabilizing—and, perhaps, I might not have accepted the Faustian bargain he proposed. He also knew that, once handed over, I would ask his Western counterparts—or they would have to tell me—about my husband’s fate. This would undoubtedly devastate me—even if my feelings toward Jurgen were, at best, mixed ones. Stenhammer was counting on this devastation to make me feel even more isolated even more fearful of the fact that, if I didn’t now cooperate . . .

So . . . the truth. Or, at least, my version thereof.

I am writing this in a room they found for me in Kreuzberg. Before now I scribbled banal things in another notebook I left closed on my little desk here in my room. I had inserted three hairs in the pages of this closed notebook—and every day, when I went out for a few hours, I always returned, prepared to discover that Frau Jochum’s and Herr Ullmann’s people had been snooping around my room and reading what I had written.

But the notebook remained closed and untouched.

Once convinced that my room wasn’t being swept on a regular basis, I then did a little inspection of the basement in my building—and found a disused ventilator shaft in a particularly dark corner of this cavern. Reaching up into the shaft I discovered there was a small shelf just above its point of entry, one that could comfortably house a few journals.

That same day I went out and bought a second similar notebook to the one I had been leaving on my desk as a decoy. That night I began to write the journal I am scribbling in just now, trying to get down on paper everything that had happened to me since I was brought to the West. Every few days since that first night, I retrieve the journal from its hiding place and commit to paper all that I can never tell anyone.

I am vigilant about the fact that this journal never leaves this building, that when I finish writing in it, I always bring it straight down to its hiding place in the cellar, and do so after midnight when there is nobody around. And I keep on writing that rather prosaic decoy journal, jotting down thoughts about my work, my impressions of West Berlin, my loneliness and (yes) how much I miss my son. Once I start work, I plan to make a point of bringing it out with me and also continue to leave it on my desk at home.

And the hairs I continue to hide in its pages remain unmoved.

And when it comes to my “actual” journal, the one in which this sentence is being written right now, the journal I keep stashed in the basement . . .

Despite so carefully hiding it away—and never allowing it to remain in my room for longer than the period in which I am writing in it—I know I am still taking an immense risk in chronicling the lie I am forced to live. But writing it down means it is not just existing inside my head, that there is a place in which I can disclose what is happening to me, the deceit and fraudulence that now underscore everything about my life here. If I didn’t have the refuge of this journal, I would go under. I don’t seek absolution, but I do need confession.

I only write in this journal every few days. I always do it late in the evening—retrieving it from the basement after ascertaining that no one is in the hallway, secreting it under my shirt or sweater as I head back to my room, then returning it to its ventilator shaft hiding place as soon as I have finished my entry. I never go near it during daylight hours, no matter how much I want to get something down in it.

Kreuzberg. It is such a sad place. But I insisted on living here because, during one of our many daily “conversations,” Frau Jochum revealed, after I demanded the information, that Johannes had been placed with a Stasi family who lived in Friedrichshain. That’s when I also demanded a map of West Berlin and saw that the district closest to Friedrichshain was Kreuzberg—The Wall cleaving the two areas like a surgeon who had the shakes when making an incision, leaving a scar that looks like a demented crescent moon.

“I want to live here,” I said, pointing to Kreuzberg.

“Is that, psychologically speaking, a good idea?” Frau Jochum asked me. “After all, you will be in proximity to where Johannes lives.”

“That’s the idea,” I said. “I want to be close to my son.”

“Personally, I do not think this wise.”

“Personally, I think it essential for me,” I said.

I could see Frau Jochum pondering all this, then saying:

“All right, in time, when you are ready to go out into the world . . . yes, we will help you find an apartment in Kreuzberg.”

The “apartment” was this room. Frau Ludwig brought me out apartment hunting the next week. She said she just wanted to help me find my way around the city, but my feeling is they felt they had to chaperone me, to make certain I was stable, capable of being out on my own. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were thinking about keeping me under surveillance for the first weeks that I was an independent entity.

That’s the reason I didn’t accept Frau Ludwig’s offer of a notebook in which to record my thoughts in the weeks that they were interviewing me. I worried that they might read the notebook when I was away from the apartment. After all, they were the intelligence services—and as I was warned many times before being handed over, they would be both warm and welcoming, while privately wondering if I was “kosher.”

“The fact that your story is so horrible,” Stenhammer told me. “The fact that you can tell them about your wrongful imprisonment, and the way we took your child away from you . . .”

“But you did wrongfully imprison me,” I said. “And you did take my child away from me.”

“Then why did you sign an agreement here yesterday, offering up your child for voluntary adoption?”

I wanted to scream and shout and say: “Because you forced me to, telling me that if I didn’t agree to have Johannes adopted, you would start a criminal proceeding against me as an unfit mother and would make certain the judge at the trial ensured that I was barred permanently from contact with him.”

“At least this way,” he argued, “once you have proven your worthiness to the Republic again—once you have redeemed yourself—the return of Johannes to your custody will be a relatively straightforward business. All going well, he will be back with you within eighteen months. But this will all be based on your effectiveness for us after you are traded. Do understand: you will have to lie to people who will show you kindness, who will treat you as a heroine who was indecently abused by a ‘totalitarian regime,’ which is how they regard our highly egalitarian society where no child wants for hunger, where there is universal health care for all, where a superb standard of education exists, where artists are valued and subsidized, where merit, not money, advances all . . .”

As he spouted these propagandistic banalities, all I could think was:
Everything you described—the lack of poverty, the free hospitals, the excellent free schools—can be found in every Scandinavian country. But, unlike our little Republic, they allow their citizens the right to travel freely and they don’t imprison people for daring to voice an opinion against the state. Nor do they take away children from a citizen whose only crime is that her erstwhile husband has gone crazy in public.

But I said nothing, except: “I will do what you ask. And I will trust you when you say that if I fulfill my role, you will return my son to me.”

A large part of me knew this outcome was highly unlikely, that with Johannes having been placed with a couple who I guessed were Stasi
and
childless, they would be loath to part with him. I also knew that I couldn’t trust Stenhammer—that he was an arch manipulator who knew he held all the cards. That was the hardest part of the equation—the recognition that it was all a game of power for him, and one predicated on the fact that he also held out hope. A favorable resolution if I cooperated. What else did I have but this hope?

I’m not going to write too much about the three weeks of daily “interviews” that I had with Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann, except to say that theirs was a very polite and civilized form of interrogation. Again there was a Faustian bargain here—a nice cushioned landing in the West, in which I was put up in a luxurious apartment, bought real Levi’s and nice clothes and makeup, given a place to live and a possible job (the interview is in two days’ time), and given enough money to tide me over until I started earning. What they wanted in exchange was information. They quizzed me about everything—from Stenhammer’s interrogation techniques to how many Marlboros he smoked a day. Their interest in detail was extraordinary. They wanted to know the color of the walls in the prison in which I was kept, the type of linoleum on the floors, the height in meters of the cage in which I was allowed to exercise, the sort of recording equipment they used when questioning me, even:
Was there a specific brand of coffee that Stenhammer brewed for himself?

Information, they say, is knowledge. But after three weeks of such excruciating attention to detail I wanted to scream:
information is ennui
. But I couldn’t. I needed these people on my side. Though tedious and pedantic, they were also both so decent, so courteous, so careful never to be officious.

But they also saw me as a conduit of information. I was their entree to a closed world—someone who had been dropped into its vortex, and could now give them a firsthand account of everything I had seen and experienced.

How I wanted to break down in front of Frau Jochum and confess everything. How I wanted to make a clean breast and throw myself at her mercy. But I feared that, perhaps, they would immediately label me “damaged goods” and throw me back—at which point my destiny would be prison. Stenhammer threatened me with this, were I to be returned by “the enemy.” And the end of any hope of Johannes being returned to me. And he did promise me . . .

There are moments when I just feel like dying. Literally walking out of this room and heading to the U-Bahn station and throwing myself in front of the first oncoming train. I rationalize this decision by simply telling myself it will be the end of all pain, that it is the only way to silence the agony. For that is what I feel, hour after hour. The agony of being forced into living this double life. The agony of knowing that I am now completely alone in the world. Most of all, the wrenching agony of losing my son—and having him dangled in front of me as the prize I will receive if I give them what they want.

But what stops me from making that journey off the U-Bahn platform is Johannes. I tell myself that as long as there is even the slightest possibility of him being returned to me, I must somehow keep myself afloat.

I cannot give up hope. Because it’s all I have. Because
he
is all I have. There is nothing else in my life but my son.
Nothing
.

* * *

This room. I didn’t want to move here. I wanted to stay in the plush, cosseting world of that intelligence compound, where somebody made the bed every day and picked up the towels and did my laundry and cooked wonderful food (the vegetables alone were incredible—I had never had any access to such fresh foodstuffs), and kept a basket of fruit topped up for me every day. Apples, peaches, bananas, strawberries—all exotica back across The Wall, but so evidently abundant here. I kept wondering if, being in a special compound, I was also being granted privileged access to special delicacies, like the senior party apparatchiks back home who, rumor always had it, were allowed into special shops where hard-to-get items—like fresh fruits and Marlboro cigarettes—were accessible. What an extraordinary system. “The dictatorship of the proletariat,” as Lenin put it, in which an elite—the people who administered the dictatorship in the name of social egalitarianism—insisted that everyone accept material deprivation and profound restriction on personal liberties, while they themselves acted like a feudal ruling class and granted themselves privileges denied to all those they kept enslaved and imprisoned. No wonder poor Jurgen went mad. He actually thought his creative brilliance would be a bulwark against the system’s implacability. Those people hated artists—even the ones who paid lip service to the Republic. Because they knew that a streak of subversion always clouded their hearts. Anyway, who trusts a writer? Not only do they “sponge off life and those close to them” (a Jurgen quote), but they so often articulate the things we’re all thinking but don’t want to be made public.

This train of thought started with a comment about fruit, and how I was certain that the sweet, ripe, wildly red strawberries I was eating every morning were only being provided to me because I was a special status “guest” with information to impart. But then, one afternoon, Frau Ludwig suggested we take a walk in the area near the compound. I discovered we were a little out of town, near Spandau Prison. But the area was residential and green, with fine houses and well-maintained apartment blocks. Frau Ludwig said the area was largely working class—but the shops were still stocked with the most extraordinary range of things to buy. Just rereading that sentence I know how naïve, how
Communist provincial,
I sound. But the truth is, my eyes went wide at the sight of huge clumps of broccoli, the tomatoes the size of a clenched fist, the twenty types of chocolate on sale just by the cash register. All this choice, all this plenty, and accessible even in a small corner shop. I wanted to be thrilled by all the options that now awaited me. But all I could think was: I may have crossed over, but I am in no way free. Because they have me beholden to them if I want to see Johannes again.