“What will happen if you don’t call her?”
“More trouble than not calling her is worth.”
“OK, serious question: is this what being married is like?”
“Why? Are you considering it yourself?”
His expression became earnest. We were on a street in Prenzlauer Berg littered with the crap furniture that people had been throwing out their windows since the Wall came down. “Not marriage,” he said. “But there is a girl. She’s very young, I hope you’ll get to meet her. If you meet her, you’ll see why I’m asking.”
It was a measure of how much I was liking him that his mention of a girl made me jealous. I had no doubt that she was unbelievably beautiful and as keen for sex as Anabel wasn’t. I envied him for that. Weirder, and indicative of the raw place where losing my mother had landed me, was that I also envied the girl for the entrée that being female gave her to his private life.
“Call your wife,” he said. “I’ll wait for you.”
“No, fuck it,” I said. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
I did, in my wallet, a snapshot from Italy, a flattering picture. Andreas studied it and nodded with approval, but I saw or imagined that I saw something relax in him, as if he now knew for sure he had the better woman; had won that particular competition. I felt sorry for Anabel but sorry for myself as well, for having to be her defender.
He handed back the snapshot. “You’re loyal to her.”
“So far.”
“Eleven years — fantastic.”
“A vow is a vow.”
“It won’t be easy for me to live up to your standard.”
Already he, too, seemed to be thinking we might be friends. As we continued to walk, in the underlit streets, he alluded to his country’s pollution, its literal and spiritual pollution, and to his own personal pollution. “You don’t even know how clean you are.”
“I haven’t had a bath in three days.”
“You worry about calling your wife. You nurse your mother when she’s dying. These things seem obvious to you, but they’re not obvious to everyone.”
“It’s more like a morbidly overdeveloped sense of duty.”
“Your mother — how old was she?”
“Fifty-five.”
“Shit luck. Good mother?”
“I don’t know. I always thought she was a problem, and now I can’t think of one bad thing she ever did to me.”
“How was she a problem?”
“She didn’t like my wife.”
“And you were loyal to your wife.”
“You’ve got me wrong,” I said. “I’m sick of clean. I’m sick of my marriage. I’ve been wasting my life.”
“I know the feeling.”
“I’m so fucking sick of who I am.”
“I know that feeling, too.”
“Do you want to get a beer?”
He stopped walking and looked at his watch. It hurt my pride to be so much the asker, but I was determined to be his friend. He had an irresistible magnetism and an air of secret sorrow, secret knowledge. Years later, when he became internationally famous, I wasn’t surprised. The whole world seemed to feel what I’d felt for him, and I was never able to begrudge him his success, because I knew that underneath, inside him, something was broken.
“Yeah, OK, a beer,” he said.
We went into a bar, aptly named the Hole, and there I proceeded to lacerate myself. I told Andreas how I’d ignored my mother’s warnings about Anabel and then all but abandoned her for eleven years. How I’d ignored Anabel’s father’s warnings, ignored my own instinctual liking for him, and pledged my allegiance to a nutty woman. I was betraying Anabel with every word I said, and the terrible thing was how good betrayal felt. It was as if all I’d needed was some plausible alternative to her, some potential male friend for whom I had a crushlike feeling, to admit to myself how angry I was at her; how angry I perhaps had always been.
My confession was no less sincere for having a tactical dimension. I’d never spoken to a source about my marriage, but openness was my modus, my way of encouraging sources to open up in turn. It didn’t mean I was manipulative; it meant I had a personality made for journalism. And I could tell, from the raptness of Andreas’s attention, that my American style was effective with a German. It had been my father’s style, too, and my mother, at twenty, had been defenseless against it.
“So what are you going to do?” Andreas said when I was finished.
“Anything that’s not going back to Harlem sounds good to me.”
“You should call her tomorrow. If you’re really not going back.”
“Yeah, all right. Maybe.”
He was looking at me intensely. “I like you,” he said. “I’d like to help you write the truth about my country. But I’m afraid that if you knew my own story, you wouldn’t like me.”
“Why don’t you tell it and let me be the judge.”
“If you could meet Annagret, you might understand. But I’m not allowed to see her yet.”
“Really.”
“Yes, really.”
The bar had filled up with cigarette smoke, cancerous-looking men, and girls with haircuts that only a day ago I would have considered ghastly. Now, when I permitted myself to imagine sleeping with one of those haircuts, it seemed like something I would soon be doing, if I didn’t leave Berlin.
“It’s good to talk about things,” I said.
He shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”
We were in territory familiar to a journalist. Sources who bothered to allude to stories they couldn’t tell me almost always ended up telling them. The important thing was to talk about anything that wasn’t the untold story. I bought us another round of beers and got him laughing with an attack on twentieth-century British literature, which he seemed to know inside out and was shocked by my dismissal of. Then I defended the Beatles while he extolled the Stones, and we found common ground in ridiculing the Dylan worshippers, both American and German. We talked for three hours, while the Hole emptied out and the untold story hovered in the vicinity. Finally Andreas covered his face and pressed hard on his closed eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
It was curious, in retrospect, how little I’d identified with my father; how wholly I’d sided with my mother. But now she was dead, and as I walked into the dark Tiergarten with Andreas I could have been my dad on the night he’d met her. A chance meeting, a tall young woman from the East, a city alive with possibility. He must have been amazed to have her at his side.
We sat down on a bench.
“This is not for publication,” Andreas said. “This is simply to help you understand.”
“I’m here as a friend.”
“A friend. Interesting. I’ve never had a friend.”
“Never?”
“When I was in school, people liked me. But I found them contemptible. Cowardly, boring. And then I became an outcast, a dissident. No one trusted me, and I trusted them even less. They were cowardly and boring, too. A person like you couldn’t have existed in that country.”
“But now the dissidents have won.”
“Can I trust you?”
“You have no way of knowing it, but, yes, you absolutely can.”
“See if you still want to be my friend when you hear what I have to tell you.”
In the darkness, in the center of a city too diffuse and underpopulated to fill the sky with its noise, he told me how well connected his parents had been. How privileged he himself had been until he’d thrown away his life with an act of political defiance. And how, after his expulsion from the university, he’d drifted into a Milan Kundera world of pussy; how he’d then met a girl who’d changed his life, a girl whose soul he loved, and how he’d tried to save her from the stepfather who’d abused her. How the stepfather had pursued them to his parents’ dacha. How he’d killed the stepfather in self-defense, with a shovel that happened to be at hand, and buried the body behind the dacha. He told me about his subsequent paranoia and his good fortune in retrieving his police and surveillance files from the Stasi archives.