​DECLASSIFIED on the orders of the Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Stasi Records Agency) on December 22, 1994.

 

August 13, 1963

 

My darling Uli,

 

The world can change in the space of a heartbeat. That’s what I recall telling myself on the day that you proposed. I think about that day so often, and it seems both more and less real to me than my life now: a moment spent on the precipice of joy and despair. In that space between your question and my inevitable answer time seemed to slow, somehow: thinking on it now, I could swear that the sound of traffic outside the window fell silent; that the rain hung, suspended, over the stopped cars on Bernauerstrasse.

 

I suspect it must have been agony for you, sitting there with the ring between us, waiting for me to respond. But there was something in the silence I longed to savour: the possibility, I suppose, of what your question held for us both. The endless hope I felt in the moments before it all became real.

 

Perhaps I wanted to remain there because real life carries risk… real love carries, inevitably, pain. Bittersweet heartbreak. For isn’t that what lies at the heart of love, Uli: the inevitability of betrayal, in one form or another? Betrayal by infidelity, by apathy — by sickness, or death. A beginning contains, at its very core, an inevitable end. I wonder. Is the risk of love worth it?

 

But I wasn’t thinking of any of that on the day you proposed. All that I could think about was wanting to live in the sweetness of that moment: in that space between your question and my answer.

 

I suppose, then, that there’s some justice in love.

 

Because I’ve lived in that unbearable purgatory every day since.

 

Yours always,

Lise

 

UNDELIVERED. Intercepted by the East German Ministry for State Security on August 14, 1961.

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