It made sense, so much sense. I wanted to write it all down, record it, tell everyone I knew how these people had got it, they’d really got it!
I tried to tell Martin about it, but he was dancing, really manic. He’d got it, I could tell.
He was pissed, well pissed.
It was good.
Martin
“Come on Marty! Let’s go and see Annette! She’ll be pleased to see us!”
It was past midnight. At least, the blurred outlines of the hands on my watch, they were both pointing somewhere near the top. Yeah. Middle of the night.
Annette? Why not? Something niggled, some thought trying to escape my befuddled brain. Something about Annette. I had fences to mend, I had to tell her how much she meant to me, that I’d missed her and was sorry we weren’t together any more. She’d be pleased to see me, and I could tell her how I felt. And Karo was with me, we could go dancing, the three of us. In Kreuzberg.
We climbed the steps to the elevated railway, got on the ivory and yellow train that soon rattled into the station and we cheered as it dived down the ramp into the tunnel. We weren’t the only party-goers aboard, an accordion started playing at the other end of the carriage, and I swayed around, more or less in time to the music, hanging on to a strap.
“You know that list you gave me? I sent it to K1,” I told Karo, shouting above the noise of the accordion.
“K-fucking-1?” shouted Karo back. “Do they still exist? Fucking lowest of the fucking low! Fucking Stasi swine.”
“No, no, no.” I tried to put her right. “They’re DVP, they’re cops. They’re different from the Stasi.”
“Fuck off!” was Karo’s answer.
We got off less than ten minutes later, at Märkisches Museum, swerving down the road, towards the border crossing point about a kilometre away. Karo still had her bottle of beer to keep her company, but I seemed to have lost mine. Was it still on the U-Bahn?
“I lost my bottle!” I exclaimed to the sleeping streets.
Karo just giggled and wobbled out into the middle of the road.
The border guards at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse stood just outside their hut, arms crossed across their chests.
“Evening, comrades, do you intend crossing into West Berlin?”
Drunk as I was, I could still sense the disapproval, a priggish concern that if we entered the West in such a bibulous state we may sully the good name and standing of the German Democratic Republic.
“I, comrades …” I started, before fumbling through my shoulder bag, looking for my identity papers, the ones that identified me as a captain of the Republikschutz. “My magic papers, magic will get us through,” I breathed over to Karo, who giggled again.
But I couldn’t find my magic RS identification. I looked over to Karo, who was carefully balancing her beer bottle on the kerb. Did she have my papers? No. But they’re not in my bag and not in my pockets. With a sigh, I decided that a bluff would do the job, I just needed to be insouciant enough in the execution.
“My papers, comrade!” With a flourish I produced my blue civilian identity card.
The guard I was addressing looked over to his colleague, raising an eyebrow. The other gave a small shake of the head, and we were let through.
The West Berlin policeman on the other side deliberately looked away as we crossed the white line that delineated West from East, bad from good, rich from poor.
We stood at the huge roundabout of Moritzplatz, wondering which way to go. A cool breeze was blowing against my face, waking me up a bit. An empty cola can clattered along the gutter, and a sheet of newspaper pressed itself against my ankles.
“Where does your Annette live?” asked Karo, looking around, bewildered, paying attention to the edge of the pavement, aware that here in the West, even at this time of night, it didn’t do to stand in the middle of the road.
“Too many fucking cars!” she shouted at a passing Volkswagen.
I was beginning to have doubts. I looked at my watch again. It was after two o’clock. I could see it clearly now, I was beginning to sober up. It was quite a walk from here to where Annette lived. My synapses started to connect again, my brain slowly working out that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to call on Annette right now. Or maybe ever again. I’d scared her off last year, when I’d last seen her. My job had scared her off. Maybe she didn’t want to see me. No, if she wanted to see me, she’d have been with us tonight. No, no, no. Not a good idea at all.
I turned to Karo, feeling the need to impart this great news to her.
“Karo, Karo, shhh! Listen: you ready? This is veryveryveryimportant.”
Karo drew herself up, standing to attention in front of me, wind ruffling her bright red hair. She pressed her thumb to her forehead, palm held straight out in a mock Pioneer salute: always prepared.
“I. Don’t. Think.” I said, enunciating each syllable so, so perfectly, “That. We. Should. Gotosee. Annette.”
Karo shrugged and set off down Oranienstrasse, singing U2’s One. I followed, not for a moment wondering where we were going.
Day 8
Monday 21st March 1994
Berlin: The South Friedrichshain Neighbourhood Round Table has repeated requests for dialogue with residents of the Wagenburg on the banks of the Spree.
A spokesperson for the Neighbourhood Round Table stated that there was ongoing conflict with local residents and industry, including the Reichsbahn and the Border Regiment. The Wagenburg has allegedly refused to meet local stakeholders.
Martin
“Jeez, Papa! How old are you?”
I couldn’t work out whether Katrin was pissed off or amused. Possibly a bit of both, I decided in the gaps between the hammer blows that were pounding the inside of my head. It was the same banging that caused my skull to swell and made black rings blur my vision. Old enough, I thought to myself, to know how to avoid a hangover.
“What are you doing here anyway? At least you didn’t puke all over my flat.”
One of us had been sick last night. I remembered that. We were ringing Katrin’s bell, pushing it, holding it in. I was. That was it, I rang the bell while Karo puked all over the pavement.
“Here’s some money, go and get some rolls. I’ll get the coffee going and try to wake up Karo.”
I looked at the coin in the palm of my hand as if I’d never seen Westmarks before: a West German eagle on one side, and some face on the other, maybe a president or a chancellor? I turned it over and over, noticing the words stamped on the edge of the coin: Unity and Justice and Freedom. Putting the money in my pocket I went down the stairs and out of the tenement block. A Turkish lady in a head scarf was throwing a bucket of water over Karo’s vomit. She caught my eye and shook her head sadly, as if to say young people today! I looked down and hurried off round the corner.
Karo’s vomit wasn’t the only refuse on the street, I wandered past a footstool, horsehair stuffing trickling out of a rip in the vinyl covering. A little further on—sprinkled around the trunk of a tree that looked like it probably wouldn’t bother with leaves this year—lay empty cigarette packets, a couple of crushed coke cans and a smashed beer bottle. Fag ends and splots of dried chewing gum littered the pavement. The West: so rich, so many things available in the shops, no shortages. But their streets were paved with carcasses of consumption.
A group of punks came towards me. It wasn’t until they were almost level that I realised they weren’t the young people I had taken them for but were all about my own age. Ragged, saggy leggings, ripped leather vests and jackets, studs and hoops in ears and noses, they came towards me, uncertainly following the drunken pavement, holding tightly onto their bottles of beer.
“YougoddaMarkforme?” one of them slurred in my general direction.
I shrugged my shoulders, bunching my hands in my pockets.
“Krotte, leave ’im be,” shouted another punk from the back of the group. “He ain’t got no dosh, he’s an Ossi! Got less than we ’ave, that lot!”
The group laughed harshly, and disappeared into a bar. Curious, I looked in through the open door, peering past the thick cigarette smoke that condensed into the street. Icons, religious reliquaries and statues hung behind the bar, draped with medals and crucifixes on chains. Many of the clientèle looked like they had moved in when the place opened and had never managed to leave again. Going by the patina of ossified dust and nicotine, that must have been a decade or two ago.
I smiled to myself and made my careful way to the bakery. Eyeing the distended golden crust of the rolls in the basket behind the counter I again considered the money I held in my hand.
“How do you get them so crispy and full of air?” I asked the lady behind the counter.
“Are you going to buy anything or did you come over here just to ask stupid questions?” she snapped back in Berliner dialect.
I shrugged and did some mental arithmetic. I had two Marks, so could just about afford six rolls with a bit of change left over. At home I could get over twenty Schrippen for two Eastmarks—or on the black market I could exchange these two Westmarks for twenty Eastmarks and buy two hundred rolls. And at home they were solid affairs, full of bread; not like the crusty air bags that I was looking at now.
I was taking too long for the shop assistant and she’d started serving another customer. I waited patiently for her to turn back to me.
“So, what’s it to be? You decided what you can afford?”
I was looking at the glistening layers of the Splitterbrötchen, the dark surface pocked with powdered cinnamon.
“How much are they?” I asked.
“Mark-forty.”
One Mark forty. I looked at the two Mark piece in my hand, and dug into my pockets, fishing out my Eastmark change. I easily had about ten Marks worth there.
“We only take proper money—none of your dodgy scrap aluminium!”
The bread rolls were still warm, I could feel the heat through the colourful paper bag. It felt good in my hand, and I had to stop myself from curling my fingers around one of the rolls, squeezing until the crust splintered and the soft dough inside collapsed. They looked so good, these rolls. My mind fixed on that thought, keeping hold of it, past the waves of pressure that were still gripping my head with every footstep. It was all about appearances, how they looked.
Like the punks. They looked so young, but when they got closer, they were my age.
Here in the West things don’t always appear as they seem. Brilliant Martin, I thought to myself. With thinking like that you’ll soon solve all the problems of the world. But another thought was trying to make its way through my hangover. The boat the other night, or rather the boats. I hadn’t been able to work out what they were up to, what the point of their theatrical manoeuvres could have been. But, the thought persisted, perhaps that was exactly what it was: a piece of theatre, designed to distract us. Even the boat that had slipped across the Landwehr Canal to deliver a small package was a double bluff.
No, a triple bluff—we were meant to believe that the small package was the reason behind the activity on the river Spree. Next time the Grenzer would be watching the Landwehr Canal, and maybe the river between Oberbaum Bridge and Elsen Bridge. Customs and Border Guards would be focussing along the canal and the weir lead. Any forces on the Oberbaum Bridge would be looking upstream. Which would leave the downstream sector of the river—towards Schilling Bridge—practically unobserved. And that was a section of the river that had another Wagenburg directly on the water’s edge: no border guards on the ground there.
When I got back I found the kitchen table laid for two.
“Karo’s still asleep,” said my daughter. “She’s snoring away, so I left her to it.”
I nodded, there wasn’t much to say, and I was still thinking about my new theory. We sat down and Katrin cut all the bread rolls in half: neat, no crumbs flaking away from the crust, the soft, doughy bread inside not balling up but sliced straight down the middle.
“Papa,” Katrin said in that cautious voice she used when she wanted to talk seriously.
I looked up from my bread roll.
“Papa, thanks for the other day. I know it wasn’t easy for you.”
I shrugged, what are fathers there for? “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”
A long pause while Katrin worked out how to reply, carefully considering how to put her words into place.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I wish I did. It’s not like I’m thinking about it all the time. But I sit there in my room, I’m meant to be studying, and out of the corner of my eye I’ll see her letter. Just sitting there, on the edge of my desk. I don’t even know what to do with the letter. I don’t want to throw it away, not yet. And I don’t want to file it away—that way I’ll let myself forget about it and I won’t ever decide what to do. So for the moment it’s sitting there, on the corner of my desk, reminding me that I need to make a decision.”
“It’s OK, you know,” I said, then broke off and started again. “I mean, it’s your choice. To write to her. Or not. I won’t be upset.” I wondered how truthful my words were. How much would it bother me if my daughter wrote to the woman who had abandoned her when she was a small child? Abandoned us, both of us.
It was so long ago, another life, another State, another history. I couldn’t be angry at her after all these years, no, not angry. But it still hurt. I understood only too well why she’d gone: the frustration, the feeling of being trapped, the claustrophobia. I’d had those reactions too but we’d each had different ways of dealing with them.
Except that Katrin’s mother hadn’t really found a way to deal with it—she’d fought her way out of East Germany, like a wild animal trapped in a cage fights to escape, no matter the cost. She’d left behind her family, so desperate was she to get out. Had I forgiven her? The years had softened the hard, sharp edges of pain, but it was still there. A scar on my heart, reminding me of past torment; aching when the weather turned, or when the moon waxed to full.
“Papa, I know it’s my choice.” She smiled and touched my hand with her long fingers. “I know. But first I have to decide whether I actually want to have contact with her. If I do, then I’ll talk to you about it first.” Her eyes sought mine, looking for understanding. “I promise. I don’t want to cause you any hurt, but right now I don’t even know what to think. I’ve no idea what to do, what the right thing to do might be.”
My daughter had been speaking slowly, with lots of gaps. She was thinking aloud. Now there was another pause, a gap in which we both digested the words we’d said and heard. This conversation had been years in the coming, there was no rushing it. It would take a while to reach any conclusion. Love is complicated, how can it be described? How can it be quantified, weighed across the years and the miles and the borders that stood between the pair of us here in Berlin and the mother that hadn’t been a mother for so long?
“Would it have been better if she hadn’t contacted you?”
Another pause while Katrin considered her answer.
“Perhaps,” she answered finally. “It’s like I can feel her, waiting. Somewhere in West Germany. Waiting for an answer.” She was staring at our clasped hands, trying to find the right words. “I can feel her hope. Hoping I’ll write back, forgive her. But I’m not sure it’s me who should be doing any forgiving. She’s nothing but an impression from the past, a ghost. It doesn’t feel like it’s up to me to forgive her. Maybe that’s for you—maybe that’s your job. I was so young, I hardly remember her. She was always there, but as an absence—I never found a way to talk to you about it because I could see how much she’d hurt you.” She placed her hand briefly on my forearm, a light touch, then she was talking again. “What she did, that hurt you. When I look back at that time, I can’t remember anything concrete, except that she broke you.
“And every time I think about picking up a pen, writing an answer, every time I do that, I can’t. Because it’s too complicated. I don’t know wh
at to think, what to say. Hello mum,” she said, in a slightly ironic tone, quoting her unwritten letter. “Thanks for sending me a letter after all these years. I’m fine, Papa’s fine, hope you’re fine. Lots of love, your daughter. Doesn’t really work, does it? There are too many strands binding the past and the future, and it’s like I need to cut through them before I can know what I want.”
Perhaps I understood, perhaps I knew what Katrin meant. Writing a letter to her mother wasn’t just a simple correspondence, an action in the present. It meant dealing with the past but also looking into the future: one letter or constant contact? Would it stop at letters, or would they meet? What kind of relationship would they have? What kind of relationship could they have? When her mother had left Katrin had been a little girl, a Young Pioneer in her blue neckerchief. Now she was an adult, making her own way in life.
And her mother would be different too—what she went through back then, all the things that might have happened since then, they would have changed her, moulded her. When she put in her application for an exit visa she was ready for the harassment from the state. To some extent I could support her at that stage, even though I didn’t agree, I wanted to stay, wanted her to stay too. But when they took her away, from that moment on she was by herself. I have no idea what she’d been through. She would have been in prison. Softened up in Hohenschönhausen, after that Hoheneck. Hell holes that break your spirit. Then they would have released her to the West. She’d never written to tell me what had happened. Or if she had, then the letter had never arrived. All I knew was that one day I’d received a summons. I was required to go to the police station. An anonymous room, an anonymous man sitting behind an empty desk. He informed me of my wife’s release, that she was no longer a citizen of the GDR, that she had forfeited the privilege of living in the socialist state. He had meant release from jail, but for her it was a release from a prison that was the size of this country.
Thoughts Are Free Page 9