I looked across at Frau Schneider, her hand wobbling as she lifted the cigarette towards her mouth, inhaling slightly, clumsily. Her hair was grey and formed into a bun, and under her eyes she wore distinctive wrinkles which spoke of wisdom and experience. But in truth her skin looked surprisingly youthful. It was when she moved that I realised her age. She seemed frail on her feet. Those feet were tiny too – I looked at them swinging backwards and forwards in mid-air, at the white lace-up pumps she’d slid them into. Her dress was some kind of vintage 1960s number, covered in an elaborate, jaunty pattern of tropical fruit and birds. Quite a sight, in fact. Bel had told me that during the shortages all East German women had become expert seamstresses; they had to be. Communism couldn’t keep up with consumer demand. Fashion was un-socialist. But there were hundreds of thousands of girls who just wanted to be like normal young women in other countries: to wear the latest skirts, to paint their face with make-up like film stars, to flirt with boys in discos. They just wanted to be normal, and they were trapped in this surreal world of want and authoritarianism where they had to sob in silence lest the Stasi get the idea that they were sick of the status quo and plotting a flight to the West.
‘We went mad,’ said Frau Schneider, unprompted. ‘We all went mad. When this city was… cleaved in two, a madness descended. Nothing was real, nothing made sense, no one was happy. We were living in a world of fantasies and phantoms. The people at the top were psychopaths, the Stasi was run by people who weren’t mentally right, the people themselves slowly lost their minds. I could feel myself losing my grip on reality. I just couldn’t let her grow up here. I couldn’t do that. She was indoctrinated enough in the state kindergarten system – they all were. I just couldn’t let her live like this, in a cage. I had to set her free. Do you understand, Donald? I had to. I wonder if we’d have escaped if the wall had stayed up. I’d have found a way for her to. She was so lucky it came down when she was eighteen. I knew she was going to leave. I wanted her to. But I missed her so much it broke me. The whole situation tested everyone. We were all on the edge, always so anxious.’
My arms instinctively reached out to Frau Schneider and scooped her frail body towards mine. She probably thought there wasn’t any madness in Birmingham, under its traffic islands and in its tower blocks. In me? Now wasn’t the time for that chat though.
‘Do you understand?’ She sobbed and shook, and I stroked her hair as she rested her head on my chest. ‘But I paid such a high price, Donald. Such a high price. I felt as if I’d lost her years ago. Seeing her so little, seeing you both so little. But I had to do it… for her.’
‘I know. You did the right thing.’
A sparrow appeared from nowhere and landed on the floor, just three feet away from us. Its jittery movements were so rapid, so edgy, so precise. Its head jutted left and right as if aware of some constant threat, something preying on it at all times. It opened its beak, then flew off, out and away towards the middle of Berlin.
‘She was pregnant.’ I hadn’t spoken those words out loud. No one knew. Words mean history is true. Saying something means an event actually happened, you didn’t imagine it. If I didn’t say it, it wasn’t real. ‘Bel was pregnant when she died. We didn’t know if we ever could. I thought it was my fault, I had a… It was probably our last chance.’
Frau Schneider moved her head away from my chest and looked up at me. Her eyes showed that her soul had collapsed, and I guess mine had too. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘Donald…’
*
My room was little bigger than a closet. Hotel Bohm was, Kate told me when she was booking it for me, a ‘hipster boutique kind of place’ – and this meant that it was somewhere people wanted to stay. Because it was a ‘hipster boutique kind of place’, that meant the rooms could be very small and very claustrophobic. I found this odd, as Berlin is not a city where space is at a premium. There’s so much room, in fact, that Berlin feels more like a country. It even gives sprawling Brum a run for its money.
But anyway, the room was Lilliputian. It was as if a divorcee needing a lodging on the fly had just come along and jammed all their stuff into a tiny space. The bed was shoved up onto a raised platform, and right beside it was a shower and a toilet in a small box. You had to duck to get into this quasi-bathroom. A solitary window looked out on the Prussian-style courtyard below.
It was too hot and I woke up in the night. I think I woke up. And put on the light…
Two figures were immediately illuminated.
‘What the fuck are you two doing here?’
‘Oh, don’t mind us.’
‘Yep, forget about us. We’re not here.’
‘You are here.’
‘Rocaster and I were just in the area. Couldn’t stop ourselves popping in. I mean, this really is a lesson in bad planning, isn’t it?’
‘Bad design.’
‘Indeed.’
The pair of them were squashed up together on the wooden platform at the end of the bed. There was about eight inches between where the bed ended and the wall began, and they just sat there, looking about the room, cross-legged.
‘This is getting ridiculous.’
‘It’s not ridiculous at all. On the contrary, it’s rational for us to be here. It’s rationality we seek!’
‘I agree with Mr Benedetti. We’re just trying to learn some lessons.’
‘Why are you following me?’
‘Following you? Are we following the chap, Rocaster? I don’t believe we’d do that, would we?’
‘Absolutely not.’
I was losing my temper, especially with Benedetti. He sat there, calm as a vicar, looking down his nose at me, while Rocaster held his hand up, apparently making mental measurements.
‘You killed me last time I saw you. You pushed me off those fucking flats in Druids Heath! I don’t want to die anymore. I want to live. For Bel. For Frau Schneider. For Kate. For Bob. For… me.’
‘Kill you?’ Benedetti scoffed. ‘Bunkum. Why ever would we do something like that? What a ridiculous suggestion. Maybe it was a dream?’
‘I can’t take any more of this. I want you both to fuck off.’
Rocaster looked stung.
‘We’ve been thinking,’ said Benedetti. ‘We’ve been thinking about those appalling… sick buckets, those glass cages they want to build once they’ve demolished the masterworks of our era. They’re proposing a lot of filth where the best of, well, our modern Brummagem stood, our 1960s vision. They’re knocking the important buildings down and putting up tat instead – glassy, plasticky garish apartment blocks and offices, cheap and nasty. Sullying the skyline. It simply won’t do. Have you seen the plans, Donald?’
My mouth made an ‘O’ shape and was about to answer but didn’t get a chance.
‘Because I have, and let me tell you, they’re not the kind of plans Rocaster and I would have worked up. Not in the least. They’re really second-rate. And you know what you should be doing about that, Donald?’
My mouth made an ‘O’ shape and was about to answer but didn’t get a chance.
‘You should wait until they’ve built these horrible monstrosities and you should blow them to kingdom come! No use beating about the bush here, and no use being nostalgic. No one is going to save Brum’s brutalist buildings now your wife isn’t around to whip the buggers in power into shape. No one’s listening. They’re going to demolish the lot and put up some despicable flats for a load of terrible trainee accountants and solicitors where once we had these wonderful buildings for a new age. So blow them all up! That’s the point I wanted to make.’
‘That’s the point we wanted to make,’ added Rocaster, with a wink.
I sighed, lay back down in bed, slipped an eye mask on and pulled the covers around me. ‘I want you both to just sit there quietly in the corner. Don’t make any noise. Stop inciting me to commit criminal… acts.’
There was no response.
‘Understood?’
Benedetti said, ‘
Of course, old chap. We’ll just sit… be no trouble at all.’ Then after a silence of about thirty seconds he started whistling the ‘Colonel Bogey March’. I groaned and rolled onto my side.
*
When I was a boy my dad gave me an atlas one Christmas so that I could be just like him – a knowing navigator, a pin-pointer of places, someone who’d do The Knowledge for fun. A man of the world. The atlas was hard-backed and handsome, so heavy I could hardly lift it. Instinctively, I thumbed straight to Birmingham and I marvelled at the detail on the map of the city, the names of the suburbs floating in the air and the rivers and the railways. The roads were the most magical part of all. So many of them. Some towns only had one going in and one going out. Brum was a seething snake-pit of streets, a spilled bowl of spaghetti, an unravelled ball of string. Roads criss-crossed the city, boggling the mind. I asked Dad how he could even remember where to go and he smiled one of those secret smiles and tapped his nose with his right finger. I learned later that his secret was his trusty pocket-sized A–Z, and gradually this became my handbook too, my rules of Brum, my companion on early expeditions round the city on my bike. But this giant atlas was something else – a guide to the whole world. The most important thing about the atlas was that, as the scale went down, you could see how to get from city to city, from country to country. You could see how close we were. The city map pages isolated you in a way and made it seem like each city was an island, somehow qualitatively different to every other city, when the truth was that there was a huge amount in common between those seemingly disparate conurbations.
Once I’d suitably eyed up Brum, I turned back one page and discovered a city I knew nothing about. Berlin. It looked similar to Birmingham. Though all the big cities in the atlas looked similar; they were just slightly different shapes – sometimes the sea ran up one side, or a river ran across the middle. But as well as a river, a thick black line sliced through my map of Berlin. I wondered what this strange scar running in a jagged line from top left to bottom right meant. I had to go and ask Dad. He sat me on his knee and explained as best he could.
*
A fiendish sun spat down on me as I strolled through the Tiergarten from Zoo Station. I stopped at a biergarten. The icy particles of pilsner bashed my brain and made me insensible. I thought about the German words I knew – how biergarten rhymed with Tiergarten, and I spoke some others out loud: ‘Zurückbleiben bitte!’ I laughed a little. ‘Brutalismus!’ A girl sitting next to me said ‘Ja!’ and laughed to herself. Then I spoke more sadly. ‘Zehn Brutalistische Bauwerke.’ Bel had given me a video that school children learned German with. I really enjoyed it. We watched it together, getting drunk. She offered to remove items of clothing every time I understood and spoke with a suitably Teutonic growl. She was harsh on me that night; I had to do it right for each item of clothing. I stumbled out of the biergarten, found my way past the horrendously phallic Victory Monument and pressed on towards the Interbau. I spied the array of apartment blocks rising from the green carpet of grass and bushes. I’d been here before.
35
1998
Bel held up her left hand, and her engagement ring sparkled in the sunlight. She bit her lip as if she was embarrassed about smiling too much.
‘I’ve never seen anyone this happy because of something I’ve done.’
‘I love you, Donald. I love that you love me.’
‘I bet you didn’t see that coming last night.’
‘Of course not! I thought we were just having dinner in some shitty tourist restaurant.’
‘Unbelievable.’ I tutted. ‘But I had a plan.’
‘Evidently.’
‘How long had you been thinking about this?’ She turned and opened her face to me, her eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them. ‘Well?’
‘A while. Was my timing right? I’m sure there’s a very definite time in your country that you’re supposed to propose at. No one’s late?’
‘Of course. You were late. Late like English trains. But I don’t care.’
‘Is it only English trains that are late?’
‘German trains are late too. But I guess you invented them, so you win that. And you invented that magnetic levitation train.’
I laughed at the conversational sidestep, the little eccentric flight of fancy. ‘What’s that?’
‘A train that floats on magnets. Incredible.’ Bel looked lost in thoughts. ‘It just… glides along. We really used to believe in the future. The first one was at Birmingham Airport. True story.’
‘Where did it go?’
‘From the terminal to the train station.’
‘I’ve been on it then! I must have.’
‘Good boy. And you know what else? Brum and Berlin have so much in common. Brum had the first ever maglev and we had the second ever.’
‘Where did that one go?’
‘From near Potsdamer Platz, down to Gleisdreieck Station. It was only needed because the wall cut a U-Bahn line in half. So when the wall came down and the U-Bahn lines were reconnected, pfff – it closed. It was supposed to be this futuristic technology that heralded some better world, but it hardly lasted any time at all. The quirks of life just snuffed it out.’
We came up Altonaer Strasse and suddenly there were muscular apartment blocks on each side of us. Beautiful beasts.
‘Isn’t it amazing? This is the Interbau. An architecture theme park. Some of the world’s best designers, all of them allowed to build whatever they wanted, all for the people. Well, also to show that West Was Best. We Ossies had to live in plattenbau blocks that all looked the bloody same.’
The triangular legs on one block called out to me; the curved facade of another winked. Bel patiently explained who built what and why they were the shapes they were.
‘This is from 1957. Same year as you, I think.’
‘Steady on. Not quite; you know I’m a child of the Sixties.’
‘But look at what they were trying to achieve. The best possible homes, the most stylish places, for ordinary people. All with landscaping, an architecture that was futuristic but not throwaway. A pat on the back for the city. An idea about creating a world that you could really live in. Everything a modern person could need. And it still looks good all these years later. Like you.’
‘You are a great teacher.’
‘Danke schön.’
We explored some more before eventually sitting down on the grass outside one of the blocks. We sat by the narrow face of the end of the block – which was coloured grey. It had two pairs of white box balconies protruding from the end, trying to escape from whatever lay within. I noticed the breeze gently fanning the blades of grass, making it look like we were boats on a green sea. The breeze blew Bel’s hair out of place; strands danced around her face. She tilted her head down. Her hand smoothed the strands of hair out of her way. She caught my eye and grinned sheepishly.
Bel looked up at the grey wall with the white protrusions above us. ‘Die Mauer im Kopf.’
‘The wall…?’ I couldn’t understand the rest.
‘Die Mauer im Kopf. The Wall in the Head.’
‘That’s good. What a lyrical turn of phrase. What does it mean?’
She moved across me and rested her head in my lap, looking up at my face, her body stretched languorously. ‘When the Berlin Wall came down, it only came down physically. It didn’t come down mentally. The Easterners, my people’ – she winked – ‘they still saw the wall, felt the wall, were aware of the wall’s power, its presence. It never disappeared for the people that still lived in Berlin; they still sense it. But the meaning has widened now. It explains those occasions where you feel held back by some kind of force, wherever you live. A wall in your head blocking you from doing something, an imaginary wall. I think there’s something else too – because the walls around you become walls in your head, whatever kind of walls they are. It’s not just the Berlin Wall – it could be your… your…’
‘House walls?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Or your office walls?’
‘See! You’re getting it. All these walls are walls in your own head. The buildings, the cities even, that surround us, they affect us on a deep psychological level. We have walls in our heads. All of us. Now I don’t think it always has to be in a bad way. There are lots of people who think architects are the worst enemy of the soul.’
‘But you don’t believe that.’
‘No, I don’t believe that. But I know buildings can have a profound influence on us, on the way we think and feel and behave. They can shape and mould us and affect our actions. And later on, when we think we’re acting of our own free will, well, maybe all of us have a wall in the head. Maybe all of us are doing a particular thing because of all the time we spent in a particular building – those walls are making us happy or sad. If we make good buildings, maybe we make happy people. I hope so.’
‘How’s the wall in your head?’
A chuckle. ‘I don’t have one.’
‘You have more than one! I knew it.’
‘Not me. I knocked mine down – I moved away. And besides, I’ve spent so much time learning about walls and being hemmed in by them that I have the power to get rid of them too.’ She tapped her temple. ‘With my mind. Isn’t that cool?’ Belinda blinked. ‘I can’t be constrained. You can’t constrain me! Nobody can.’
‘Do I have a wall in my head?’
‘Of course you do. All English people do. You are a very… wary lot. Lots of fears and hang-ups. And you, sir, especially, have a wall in your head. All that time spent inside small rooms, surrounded by four walls, tapping away on a keyboard. It’s made you into a monster.’
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