All Those Things We Never Said

  “You have a lot of nerve making jokes.”

  “Humor can be like a coat of armor when reality takes a stab at you. I don’t know who said that, but I know it’s the truth. Let me ask you again. Have you come to a decision?”

  “I’m not making any decisions. It’s just too late. Probably comes as a relief to you.”

  “Too late only happens when things become definitive. It’s too late for me to tell your mother all I wanted her to know before she passed. There is no letter I can read to tell me all I needed to hear before she slipped away. As far as you and I are concerned, too late is Saturday, after which I’ll be shut off for good. But if Thomas is still alive and breathing, I must politely contend that it is anything but too late! Julia, think—a mere drawing of him had you incapacitated for hours. It’s what brought us here today. Don’t try hiding behind the pretext that it’s too late. Find another excuse if you must, but don’t delude yourself with that.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. I just think you should be out there trying to find him, unless . . .”

  “Unless what?”

  “Never mind. There I go again. Talk, talk, talk . . . but you’re right.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say I’m right about a single thing. So just what am I right about?”

  “Forget about it, like I said. It’s far easier to just keep whining and complaining about what could have been. I can already hear the usual nonsense: ‘Destiny simply had other things in store for us. That’s just the way it is.’ Or, better yet: ‘It was my father. He ruined my entire life. It’s all his fault.’ Just go on wallowing in your drama. It’s certainly one way of living.”

  “God, you scared me. For a minute there I thought you were actually taking me seriously.”

  “Given the way you’ve been acting, the risk of that happening is minimal.”

  “Even if I felt completely compelled to write to Thomas, and even if I somehow managed to find his address and send him a letter this many years after the fact, I would never do a thing like that to Adam. It would be horrible. He’s had enough lies to last him a lifetime.”

  “Oh yes, spare him the dishonesty,” responded Anthony, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “As if lying through omission were any less deplorable. Go ahead, then. Just know he’s not the only person you’d be lying to.”

  “Who else, then?”

  “Yourself. Every night, falling asleep by his side, with even the tiniest memory of your long-lost love from the East popping up in your head. There you go! One little lie. Every tiny pang of regret, another little lie. Every time you ask yourself if you should have gone back to Berlin to clear your conscience, there, one more lie. Let’s break it down by numbers. I always was a natural at math. Julia tells herself—let’s say—three little lies a week, along with two memories from her past and three comparisons between Thomas and Adam . . . That’s three plus two plus three, which makes eight, multiplied by fifty-two weeks, multiplied by thirty years of marriage—perhaps that’s a bit optimistic, I know—for a grand total of 12,480 lies. Not altogether bad for the course of one marriage, come to think of it!”

  “Bravo. Impressive talent,” retorted Julia, feigning applause.

  “Sharing your life with someone for whom your feelings are shaky at best—how can that be anything but a lie, a betrayal? Do you have even the faintest notion of what life looks like when the person you’re with treats you like a stranger?”

  “Because you do, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Your mother called me sir for the last three years of her life. When I entered the bedroom, she’d show me where the toilet was, mistaking me for the plumber. Is that evidence enough, or do I need to spell it out for you?”

  “Mom really called you sir?”

  “On the good days, yes. On the bad ones, she’d call the police and tell them a stranger had broken into her house.”

  “And . . . there were things she never told you before she . . . ?”

  “Lost her mind? No need to beat around the bush, dear. And yes, there are things like that. But we’re not here to talk about her.”

  For a long moment, Anthony fixed his penetrating gaze on his daughter.

  “How’s the honey?”

  “Tasty,” she said, biting into a piece of toast.

  “A little firmer than usual, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, a bit firmer.”

  “The bees got lazy after you left home.”

  “Maybe,” she said, smiling. “So, you want to talk bees?”

  “Well, why the hell not?”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “Of course I do! What a question.”

  “Was Mom why you jumped into a gutter full of water?”

  Anthony fished around in his jacket and pulled out an envelope, which he promptly slid across the table to Julia.

  “What’s this?”

  “Two tickets for Berlin, with a layover in Paris. There was nothing direct. Flight leaves at 5:00 p.m. You can go alone, or I can come along with you. Or you can throw in the towel and forget the whole thing. Your call.”

  “Why? Why would you—”

  “Do you still carry around that piece of paper?”

  “What paper?”

  “That note from Thomas that you brought everywhere. It always appeared like magic whenever you emptied your pockets. A little piece of crumpled paper—the constant reminder of how badly I’d hurt you.”

  “I lost it.”

  “Lost it? Those kinds of things never really disappear. They come back one day, rising from the bottom of your heart. Go on, dear, get your suitcase.”

  Anthony got up to leave. On his way out the door, he turned around.

  “Hurry up! You don’t need to go back to your place. If you need something, we’ll buy it over there. We don’t have much time. I’ll be waiting outside. I’ve already called the car. Now, doesn’t that feel like déjà vu all over again?”

  Julia heard his footsteps trailing out into the front hall.

  She held her head and sighed, peeking between her fingers at the jar of honey sitting on the table. She knew she should go to Berlin, not to find Thomas but to take one last trip with her father. In her head, she swore to herself—with great sincerity—that it wasn’t a pretext or an excuse. Adam would certainly understand one day.

  Back in her room, as she was picking up her bag from the foot of the bed, she glanced toward her bookshelf. The history book with the red cover was pulled out a bit more than the others, catching Julia’s eye. She hesitated a moment, then picked up the book and pulled out a blue envelope hidden inside its cover. She slipped the envelope into her bag, shut the window, and left the room.

  Anthony and Julia arrived at the airport just as check-in for their flight was closing. The woman behind the counter gave them their boarding passes and urged them to make haste. This late, there was no way she could guarantee they’d make it before the final boarding call.

  “With this pathetic leg of mine, it’s a lost cause!” Anthony exclaimed glumly.

  “Do you have trouble walking, sir?” the young woman asked.

  “You get to be my age, you get quite the list of ailments,” he replied proudly, presenting the certificate for his pacemaker.

  “Wait right here,” she said, picking up her phone.

  A few moments later, an electric golf cart drove them to the boarding gate for their flight to Paris. With an escort from the airline, getting through security was a cinch.

  “Was it another glitch?” Julia asked, shouting to be heard as they sped down the long corridors of the airport terminal.

  “Keep it down, for God’s sake! Don’t give us away!” hissed Anthony. “Don’t worry about the leg.”

  With that, he picked up his conversation with the driver, acting truly fascinated by the minutiae of th
e airport employee’s life. Barely ten minutes later, Anthony and his daughter were the first to board.

  While two flight attendants helped Anthony get comfortable—one placing pillows behind his back, the other offering him a blanket—Julia went back to the entrance of the plane. She told the flight attendant she had one last phone call to make. Her father was already on board, and she’d be back in a few moments. She ran back up the jetway and took out her cell phone.

  “So how’s the mysterious Canadian quest coming along?” Stanley asked from the other end of the line.

  “I’m at the airport.”

  “So you did come home after all.”

  “Yes. And no. I’m leaving again.”

  “Sorry, baby-doll, I seem to be a couple of steps behind.”

  “I came back to the city this morning. I wanted to see you—really needed to—but there wasn’t a minute to spare.”

  “And where might we be headed on the next leg of the adventure? Oklahoma? Exotic Nebraska?”

  “Stanley, if you found an unopened letter from Edward, written just before he died . . . would you read it?”

  “Like I told you, Julia, he used his dying breath to say he loved me. What more could I need to know? Excuses? Regrets? Those three words meant more than all of the things we ever forgot to tell each other.”

  “So what, you would just put the letter back where you found it?”

  “I think I would, yes. But I’ve never found anything like that. Edward wasn’t much of a letter writer—he barely even wrote a grocery list! I always had to do it for him. You can’t imagine how huffy I used to get about that. And now, almost twenty years later, I still buy his favorite kind of yogurt every time I go to the supermarket. Pretty idiotic, the kind of things you remember so long after the fact, don’t you think?”

  “Not necessarily . . .”

  “Don’t tell me you found a letter from Thomas. Any time you bring up Edward, I know he’s been on your mind. If that’s the case, don’t wait—open it!”

  “You just said that you wouldn’t!”

  “Wow. You’re telling me, after twenty years of friendship, you still haven’t gotten it through your head that I’m not always the best example to follow? Open the letter! Today. Tomorrow, even, but don’t you dare destroy it. And you know what? I lied. If Edward had left me a letter, I’d have read it a hundred times, spent hours reading and rereading it, just to be sure I understood every last word. Even though I know full well he never would have taken the time to write me one. Can you at least give me a hint about where you’re going? How about, say, area code?”

  “More like country code.”

  “Whoa. You’re going abroad? Europe?”

  “Germany. Berlin.”

  There was a moment of silence. Stanley took a deep breath.

  “Okay. I’m starting to connect the dots. Baby-doll, forget the letter. Tell me you don’t mean that somehow he’s—”

  “Yes. Yes, he is. He’s alive, Stanley!”

  “Of course he is,” sighed Stanley. “And now you’re calling me from the airport to ask if you’re right to go hunt him down?”

  “I’m actually calling from the jetway to the plane . . . and I think you just answered my question.”

  “Well, then get your ass in gear, silly! Don’t miss that flight!”

  “Stanley?”

  “What now?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No, of course not. I just hate thinking of you being so far away, that’s all. Any more stupid questions?”

  “Yeah, how do you keep on—”

  “Answering your questions before you ask them? Maybe it’s my keenly honed feminine instincts. Or it could be because I’m your best friend. Now get out of here before I get all mushy about missing you.”

  “I’ll call you when we land. I promise.”

  “Sure, sure. Bon voyage.”

  The flight attendant motioned frantically to Julia that if she wanted to get on board, it was now or never. The crew was moments away from closing the cabin door. By the time Stanley remembered to ask what to say if Adam called, Julia was already long gone.

  14.

  After the meal trays had been cleared, the flight attendant dimmed the lights and plunged the cabin into near darkness. Since the beginning of their time together, Julia had never once seen her father touch a piece of food or get a minute of sleep. She hadn’t even seen him rest. It was probably normal for a machine, but it was a strange notion that took some getting used to, especially since these details reminded her that she and her father were on borrowed time, with mere days to make up for a whole lifetime. Most of the passengers slept. A few watched movies on the little seat-back screens. In the last row, a man did paperwork by the glow of his overhead light. Anthony spent the flight leafing through a newspaper, and Julia looked out her window at the silvery reflection of the moon on the wing of the plane, with the surface of the ocean below rippling blue in the night.

  That winter, I decided to leave art school and Paris behind. You did everything you could to dissuade me, but my decision was made. I would become a journalist, like you. And, like you, I set out the next morning in search of work, even though it was a lost cause for an American girl. A few days before, the streetcar lines had been restored to what they once were, linking both sides of the city. Everything around us was changing. People talked about the reunification of your country, with hopes it would soon be whole again, back to the past, before the Cold War became the central focus of all. Those who had worked for the secret police seemed to have vanished into thin air from one night to the next, taking their archives with them. A few months earlier, they had tried to destroy all of the compromising paperwork, the files that had been created about you and millions of those like you. You were among the first to protest, in an attempt to stop it.

  I have to wonder . . . were you also a number on a file? Is it somewhere out there right now, in a secret archive, with secret photos of you on the street or at work, including the names of your friends and your grandmother? Could your childhood years really have aroused the authorities’ suspicion? I wonder how we could have let all that happen, after all of the painful lessons from the last war. Was it the only way for our world to exact its revenge? You and I were born far too late to harbor any hatred for each other. We had too much to discover together.

  In the evening, when we walked around your neighborhood, I saw that you were often still afraid . . . gripped with fear every time you saw a uniform or a car that drove by a little too slowly. “Come on, let’s not stay here,” you’d say, and you’d lead me along until we could duck down the first side street, or down a set of stone steps, anything to throw the invisible enemy off our scent. When I made fun of you, you’d become angry and tell me that I didn’t understand anything, that I had no idea what they were capable of. It makes me think of all the times we went out to eat, and I would catch you searching the faces of people around us. You would suddenly announce that we had to leave—a somber face at a nearby table had reopened old wounds from your past. Forgive me, Thomas. You were right. I never knew what it was to be afraid. Forgive me for giggling when you forced me to hide under the pilings of that bridge with you because a military truck was crossing the river. I never knew, could never understand. No one in my life could, before you.

  When you’d point at somebody in the streetcar, I could tell from the look in your eyes that he was once a member of the secret police.

  Stripped of their uniforms, without their authority and arrogance, the former Stasi members melted into the city and became accustomed to the banal lives of those they had once followed, spied on, judged, and even tortured—sometimes for years. After the wall came down, most of them invented a past for themselves to mask their true identities. Others quietly returned to their former careers. For many, any sense of remorse they might have once felt evaporated over the passing months, the memory of their crimes fading away as time marched on.

  I remem
ber an evening when we went to see Knapp. The three of us took a walk in the park, and Knapp wouldn’t stop asking you questions, without realizing how difficult it was for you to answer. He believed the wall had cast its shadow on the West, where he had been, but you cried out that the shadow fell on the East, where you had been a prisoner of the concrete. “How could you get used to living like that?” he kept asking. You smiled and asked him if he had really forgotten what it was like at the start. Knapp persisted, and you finally capitulated, answering his questions. You patiently walked him through a time when everything was organized, secure, when nobody had to take responsibility, and when the risk of doing something wrong was still very remote. “We had zero percent unemployment, and the state was omnipresent,” you said with a shrug. “That’s how a dictatorship works,” Knapp concluded.

  It was convenient for a lot of people. Freedom is a huge risk, and while most people aspire to attain it, they don’t know how to put it to use. I can still picture you at that café in West Berlin, describing how everyone behind the wall in the East found a way of reinventing their lives within the confines of their cozy apartments. The mood soured when Knapp asked how many people you thought had collaborated with the secret police during the dark years. The two of you could never agree on a number. Knapp’s guess was 30 percent, at most. You said you had no idea, justifying your ignorance by the fact that you yourself had never worked for the Stasi.

  Forgive me, Thomas. You were right. It has taken me this long, until this journey back to you, for me to finally understand fear.

  “Why didn’t you invite me to your wedding?” asked Anthony, lowering his newspaper.

  Julia jumped, startled.

  “My apologies. I didn’t mean to scare you. Were you lost in thought?”

  “No, I was just looking outside, that’s all.”

  “Nothing much to see out there, except darkness,” replied Anthony, after leaning over to peer through the little window.

  “There’s a full moon.”