They’re all in the West
A card-carrying member of the Writers’ Union, for all the good it did him. He trekked daily to the ministry that handled the cultural elite of the old regime, in an effort to secure a pension of some kind. Meanwhile, he considered selling the Volvo, a perk of his position. His wife, once a cover girl for a popular glossy the party published, left in the first week. She had relatives and he’d hoped to hear from her and follow, but no word came. Her address book was nowhere to be found, so presumably she took it. He only remembered a few names: Trudy and Charlotte? Their photos were also gone. The only traces of her were what she associated with him.
The official publishing house was shuttered. His longtime editor was also gone, but his secretary answered when he rang her up, still living in her flat, she said, unsure what to do next. “They’re all in the West,” she told him, when he asked about other writers who’d interacted with the editor. Had she heard from him? A pause. “No, which disappoints me a little. We worked together for a long time. He did call me to say he was leaving, but then not a word. It’s the same with the rest. I think of following them, but could I really find a suitable position? Here at least I have a flat.”
It improved both their moods to be in contact. It led him to take out his notebook and consider the next lined pages, starting where he’d left off some months ago. It was true, he thought, that he was free now to write about anything at all. What he published in the past was at best a curiosity for some excavator of these postwar decades. At worst, would they taint anything new he might write, the way Heidegger was made to suffer for his prewar flirtations? He was, more than most, an official poet, writing odes to the regime. But there were other things, hidden even from his wife. Did she read them without his knowing? His decades of philandering prompted her exit, he guessed, but that source material had had its own prompts.
Well, those days were clearly over. But they’d agreed to meet. He’d always gone out of his way to treat the secretary with old-school deference. The editor abused her, he imagined, just as he abused his writers. He was the higher official, after all. He got on well enough with him to be granted a larger flat, an allotment garden with a small cabin, and the Volvo, as his poems enjoyed official favor. Reviewing these remaining assets, unlikely to attract the privateers, he wondered if he could effect a consolidation.
“We have to stick together,” he put it to her later. By then, they’d spent a few weekends at the cabin. She liked to garden, she said at once, a trait she had in common with his wife. He didn’t, but evidence of his wife’s attachment to it was apparent to them both, and they enjoyed whatever survived her absence. She also spent more time with him at his flat, bigger and better furnished than her own. These were selling points, he imagined.
The Volvo, kept in good condition, sealed the deal. Petra sold her flat and moved in with him. While not exactly young, her idea of companionship extended to an undemanding intimacy. He felt liberated from a marriage derailed by egotism, as she was remarkably free of neuroses. And they were both free of the party. No more paeans, no more minor officials.
She proved a better editor than her boss. She found his private work, when he showed it to her, compelling. Poems, short stories, novellas, novels, she read it all, discussing them intelligently and laying out a plan to get them published “in the West,” although it was Germany now, reunited by fiat. Her address book was full of contacts “across the border,” diligently recorded while she served as the editor’s proxy. “They imagined your odes wrote themselves, a natural outgrowth of their importance, so your official work is really the regime’s. Only this work is yours.”
She was soon on the phone, talking animatedly with one editor or another as she made her way through her address book. She seemed to remember all her encounters, in person or correspondence, with an unerring instinct for what to say, what to put forward, how to get them to advance money to have things copied and sent, and later to negotiate the deals, including translations, and film and television rights. How did she know all this? “I asked them,” she said. “Whenever they visited or wrote, I asked as many questions as I could. Perhaps they saw how it might be in the future. And I read between the lines myself, of course, but I didn’t want to leave.”
Nor did he, he realized, but they traveled to Frankfurt that October as a newly married couple, enjoying the attention his first book received, touted by his publisher as a brilliant work “for the drawer” of this East German sophisticate, hidden in plain sight behind his official duties.
It was all Petra’s doing, but he recounted it as directed. She took particular care not to contradict the actual facts, anticipating that publicity might bring out colleagues from their past. He never criticized the editor who’d employed them both, saying that everyone either had to live with the regime or flee it, and they chose to stay. That the editor had fled and they hadn’t, even now, made this ring true. “As is always the case with regimes like this, they control what they can see, but the mind rolls on, believing in the possibility of finding an audience at some future point. It happened much sooner than I could have hoped. But we’re natives, my wife and I, attached to our part of Germany and our tiny bit of its countryside.”
Petra eventually heard from the editor, who’d finally found work in the publishing arm of a public agency. He apologized for being out of touch, blaming the exigencies of his situation. “It must be gratifying for you to be married to a writer who found success on both sides of the wall,” he added.
She read the letter aloud after opening it. He owed it all to her, he said, but she shook her head. “I felt my life was entirely wasted, those first few months, but then you called to remind me that we’re still here, two natives, as you put it. When I read your private work, it confirmed the rumors but also told me you’d liberate yourself and I would help you. We didn’t have to go to the West. We had some work to do, but much of it was done already.”
“A journey, not without its moments, but none of it ever cohered into sense,” he told her. “I wrote against it, the way one tacks back and forth to make headway. When I sailed on our lake, I imagined a hidden opening, It was never clear to me where it led, but whenever I wrote, I thought of it.”
