Free The Moment by Douglas Kennedy

the woman said. “Myself, I found a job in Frankfurt in the hotel business—and within ten years was married and divorced. I also became the sales director of Intercontinental Hotels in Germany. During the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1972, I returned to my former country on business. And although he wasn’t there the only newspaper available at my hotel was the Communist Party rag, Neues Deutschland . On the masthead, whom did I discover was the new editor in chief? Florian Fallada.”
The plane had come to a halt. Snow was falling outside. Steps were being pushed toward the forward door of the aircraft.
“And you never tried to contact him? Never tried to find out what happened to him when he didn’t cross over with you?”
She looked at me as if I was the most naïve man in the world.
“Had I contacted Florian I would have destroyed his career. And as I did rather love him . . .”
“But surely you wanted to know why he didn’t make it over?”
Again she regarded me with a sort of amused skepticism.
“Florian didn’t make it over because the ladder broke. Perhaps he didn’t have enough time to find another rope to get him down into no-man’s-land. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to leave his daughter behind. Perhaps he simply decided that he had a duty to remain in the place he called home, despite all the limitations that decision imposed. Who knows? But that secret—the secret that he was minutes away from escaping—stayed with only one other person: me.
“But now you know that secret, too. And perhaps you are wondering why this stranger—this middle-aged woman who is smoking and talking far too much—decided to tell you, Mr. Young American Writer, this very private story? Because I read today in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Florian Fallada, the editor in chief of Neues Deutschland, dropped dead two days ago of a heart attack at his office in East Berlin. And now, I say good-bye to you.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“My name is my business. But I’ve given you a good story, ja ? You’ll find many stories here. The conundrum for you will be discerning which tales are true, and which are built on sand.”
A telltale bing was played over the loudspeaker system. Everyone began to stand up and ready themselves for the world beyond here. I hoisted my typewriter while putting my army greatcoat back on me.
“Let me guess,” the woman said. “Your father acts as if he doesn’t approve of you, but brags behind your back about His Son, the Writer.”
“My father lives his own life,” I said.
“And you will never get him to appreciate yours. So don’t bother. You’re young. Everything is still a tabula rasa. Lose yourself in other people’s stories and gain perspective on your own.”
With that, she nodded good-bye to me, heading off back into her own life. But once we were inside the terminal building—and waiting by the luggage carousel for our bags—she caught sight of me again and said:
“Willkommen in Berlin.”

TWO
K REUZBERG.
The woman on the plane fell from a ladder in the East Berlin district of Friedrichshain and then staggered the thirty yards or so into Kreuzberg. Whereupon a Turkish gentleman came across her, crumpled in the street, writhing in pain. Within hours of this one small incident, the terrain she had just crossed became the most contentious border on the planet.
Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg. Just steps.
Until a wall is put up. And the steps become impossibilities.
On my third morning in Berlin I took the U-Bahn to Moritzplatz and found myself looking at the border crossing that now existed at Heinrich Heine Strasse. Heinrich Heine. I’d read him in college. One of the patron saints of German Romanticism—and now the name of the principal border crossings between East and West. No doubt, the GDR authorities latched onto Heine’s antibourgeois poems as proof of his impeccable “workers of the world unite” credentials. No doubt, there were those in the West who simply