Free The Moment by Douglas Kennedy Page B

area that exuded the good life? I needed to wash up in a tough part of town.
Perhaps the reason I was already getting so absorbed with the question of “residence”—when I hadn’t even begun to work out the basic geography of the city—had to do with the book I was reading right now. With the blowing snow and the cold keeping me largely indoors, I spent much of the first few days in my room, listening to jazz on some local station and enveloped in a Christa Wolf novel, The Quest for Christa T . What intrigued me most about it was that—though the author was a much celebrated and sanctioned writer in the GDR—the novel was in no way an “official” East German text. Rather, that this tale of an essentially decent, commonplace woman living a decent, commonplace life in East Germany was mired in quiet desperation. As such it was a novel in which so much was left unsaid. As you read it you could begin to discern its subtext: the fact that it spoke about the oppressiveness of uniformity in a society that demanded absolute obedience. Its theme was the subjugation of the individual. But the way it stated its theme, by never stating its theme, both fascinated and unnerved me. Because it made me wonder: Will I ever get a handle on this place? Have I arrived in a landscape where everything is not what it seems, where the divisions, the isolation, the geopolitical schizophrenia, run so deep and are so multilayered that I will never be able to penetrate its many skins, the cloaks behind which it veils itself?
In this sense I was suffering from a writerly form of stage fright. Doubt—that great monolith that frequently positions itself in front of all of us—had arrived. Though I knew there was an irrational aspect to such doubt—that I was panicking even before I had begun to really nose around the city—it was only years (and five books) later that I came to discover this was all part of the process by which one of my travel books was written. So, on these first days in Berlin, I began the daily grind of keeping a journal. I’d arrived here with eight old-style school notebooks—the ones with laminated black-and-white cardboard covers. I’d written in them throughout prep school and college. They also came with me to Egypt. I so liked writing in these books. They brought me back to hours spent in home rooms and lecture theaters, doodling my own thoughts as I listened to some professorial type spouting off. As a result, they became an essential part of what little I packed with me whenever I traveled. I was just a little obsessive when it came to guarding their safety. My notebooks never left the hotel or the room where I was billeted at a given time. Anytime I was outside said room, I had a small pocket-sized jotter with me. Whenever I returned back to the place I was sleeping I would immediately begin to write down, in narrative form, all that happened to me that day—including as much dialogue as I could remember.
This tedious task became an essential discipline. I simply had to keep writing. For I worried often that if I didn’t keep up with the story it would slip away from me.
My first two indoor days in Berlin didn’t give me much in the way of material. And I decided, on the third night, that I would ignore all the advice given me by Frau Weisse to stay off the frostbite-inducing streets. So I did venture out that evening, daring to walk the two miles from Savignyplatz to Potsdamer Platz and the Philharmonie. The snow that had blanketed the city for the past seventy-two hours had stopped, but the wind remained polar. After traversing the bright lights of the Kurfürstendamm—with its illuminated department stores and modern office buildings, its air of mercantile buzz—I began to regret my decision to sludge through the ferocious cold, especially as I was heading to the Philharmonie ticketless. The concert was long since sold out. Even Frau Weisse, who seemed to have connections everywhere, couldn’t pull