Here in Berlin

by Cristina Garcia

  That first winter in the divided city was bleak. The temperature regularly dropped below zero, and the endless gray of the skies depressed Dr. Soto to the bone. He and Camille lived in a cramped fourth-floor walk-up near the Staatsoper. Their back window overlooked a mature chestnut tree, desolate in winter but alive with nightingales in the spring.

  In what spare time he had, Dr. Soto circulated petitions against Pinochet’s mounting abuses, underscoring the dictator’s connections to the Nazis. Camille reached the expected milestones without fanfare. The years flew by until one day Dr. Soto failed to recognize himself in a tram window. Youth had turned its back on him forever.

  4.

  This afternoon, Dr. Soto received more bad news from his ophthalmologist. His cancer, Dr. Alves said, was spreading. It was unclear to him now what the future held except a more precipitous end. She recommended that he see an ophthalmic oncologist before it was too late.

  “Too late for what?” he retorted, bristling.

  “To save your life.”

  “So, you think I’m afraid of dying?”

  Physicians, he knew, were myopically trained to prolong life. Never mind what the body decreed. If it weren’t for his daughter, Dr. Soto might have ended his life long ago. After leaving Dr. Alves’s office, he walked along the Spree River to empty his mind. On weekends, he often enjoyed watching the tango dancers on its banks. The river’s glistening surface reminded him of sliding plate glass. Gulls soared above him, swiveling on gusts of wind.

  On his way home, Dr. Soto stopped at the tobacconist’s and splurged on two Cohiba Espléndidos. He offered one to the Visitor, though he was ambivalent about her interest in him.

  “Please take one,” Dr. Soto insisted, against her protests. “May it bring you closer to what you seek in Berlin.”

  Yelena Dmitrevna Z.

  Signals

  A scent accompanies her,

  less a scent

  than a sweet pressure of the air

  against my brain . . .

  ——Gottfried Benn

  Dead moths litter the windowsill of Raya’s hospital room. When she takes a deep breath—like that, see?—her eyes flutter as if they might reopen. Every hour or so, I wipe the crust of dried tears from her lashes with a damp handkerchief. Sixty-eight years ago, Berlin fell to us. I say “us,” Dear Visitor, because we were with the victors. Raya Semenovna and I were signalers then, sticking together during the campaign west. The brutal months of winter fighting finally yielded to the muddy relief of spring. In the push toward Berlin, we helped control the roads into the city, blazed night into day with our searchlights.

  My grief as Raya’s death grows near is more than I can bear. When we met, she was a strong village girl who could drop off to sleep in a snowstorm. And she could match, drink for drink, any soldier in our battalion. Now I fear that Raya won’t ever wake up again. On Thursday she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and slipped into a coma. Her heart remains strong, but her mind is unlikely to recover. Our son, Osip Pyotrovich, is rushing here from Kazakhstan, where he’s a petrochemical engineer.

  Our story is long but if it pleases you, I can offer you a few details. On the march to Berlin, Raya got pregnant. A stray bullet killed the father, Pyotr Ivanovich Kurpatov, the very morning after their tryst. Raya didn’t cry at the news—not then, or ever. She hid the pregnancy under her Red Army coat. Only I knew the truth. As the Shturmoviks flew overhead, Raya and I swore that when the war ended, we’d return home and raise our children together (she encouraged me to get pregnant, too). Our plan? To tell everyone that our husbands had died at the front. Who could dispute us?

  Try the postal clerk, Raya said, prodding me. He’s a gentle one. And so I waited at the end of a long line of soldiers who were sending their loot home.

  “Germans smashed my house. Take it! If you don’t, you’re not the post office!” the harelipped sniper shouted, thrusting forward panes of glass he’d tied together with wire.

  Other soldiers sent home sacks of nails or Gretchen knickers. I laughed, imagining how their wives would react.

  Our best gunner handed over a rolled-up saw.

  “You could’ve wrapped it, at least,” the postal clerk snarled. This was Anatoly Borisovich, the fellow Raya had recommended.

  “I’ve just come from the front!” the gunner huffed. He wore a pilfered pink brassiere as earmuffs.

  “And where’s the address?” Anatoly Borisovich demanded.

  “On the saw. Here, see?” He pointed to the faint scratching on the blade.

  Finally, Anatoly Borisovich shrugged and accepted the package.

  Two more men stepped up with their booty crudely sewn in sheets. They’d paid an old Frau in fresh bread for this handiwork. Another showed up with a box of light bulbs, each carefully wrapped in a scrap of felt. By the time it was my turn, Anatoly Borisovich glared at me, exasperated.

  “What do you want?” he barked.

  I looked behind me before leaning toward him and whispered: “To find comfort in your arms.”

  It was true that Anatoly Borisovich was a gentle lover, but he didn’t impregnate me. You’re too thin, Raya scolded. You have to fatten yourself up. Russian men, then as now, prefer plump partridges, rolls of buttery flesh to hold and squeeze. I was an unappealing sack of bones. No doubt my distaste for men’s coarseness dampened my enthusiasm.

  

  When the time came to storm the Führer’s bunker, Raya and I were selected to accompany the elite troops. This was a great honor. The bunker looked as if Hitler had been expecting guests—the kitchen well stocked, the cutlery arranged, fresh jonquils on the dining table. But on the roof, pyres of ash still smoked. Those Nazi cowards had killed themselves rather than face the Russian music. Worst of all, we found six dead children inside, the oldest with bruises on her face. Later, we learned that they were Goebbel’s kids and their mother had force-fed them cyanide.

  Raya and I were assigned to comb through Eva Braun’s quarters. Such luxuries we found! Raya took great delight in tickling me with an ostrich plume plucked from a blue satin hat. Then she sprayed me with so much perfume I doubled over coughing, my eyes watering.

  “Look at this!” Raya squealed, throwing me a silver fox fur cape. I took it to please her, but it was she who wore it after the war.

  She tried on a sparkling white evening gown embroidered with crystals. After months of army uniforms, the sight of Raya’s radiant breasts (swollen from her pregnancy) shocked us both. Embarrassed, I busied myself trying on Eva’s shoes—our feet were exactly the same size—but took nothing for myself.

  

  Dear Visitor, this Spanish talcum powder is Raya’s favorite. She used to dust it on herself after every bath. Here, take a whiff. It’s a blend of sandalwood and roses. Poor Raya doesn’t smell like herself anymore, and her hair has a faint carbolic scent. After the Wall fell, Raya practically led the mob that stampeded on KaDeWe, the luxury department store on the Ku’damm. She couldn’t get enough of Western face creams, bubble baths, nail polish, eye shadows. Ah, my Raya was feminine to her core. How could I resent the expense? To see her happy made me happy. I had no other goal in life.

  After I visit Raya, I go to the cemetery nearby. It’s dedicated to the Russian soldiers who died in the battle for Berlin. I remember our friends—Daniil Karpovich Fedorenko, Vasily Sergeyevich Leptev, Stepan Stepanovich Gushin, Elena Glebovna Artyomov, a signaler like us, who died with six others in a direct tank hit. Elena had loved wristwatches and wore a dozen up and down her arms. All the soldiers were obsessed with them. Most of us had at least three—one set to Moscow time, one to Berlin, and another to our hometowns.

  Have you seen that famous photo of Russian soldiers raising our flag on the Reichstag? Did you know that it had to be officially altered? That’s
right. Too many stolen watches on the conquerors’ arms!

  After the fall of Berlin, our platoon was lucky to get a requisitioned house in what must’ve once been a rich district. Even badly damaged, the place was beautiful: a bathtub big enough for two, a walk-in freezer, ceilings high enough to stack three Russian huts. Why had Hitler attacked us when his own people lived so much better than ours? In the library, we found a parrot squawking “Heil Hitler!” next to a bronze bust of the Führer. The damn bird wouldn’t shut up, so we shot it full of holes. As for Hitler’s bust, we dug a pit in the garden, dropped the bronze to the bottom, and used it as a latrine.

  Victory wasn’t the end of our suffering, Dear Visitor. Thousands of Red Army veterans were deported to the gulag on false charges of collaborating with the enemy. Every last soldier understood that it was better to die fighting than to be taken prisoner. Stalin’s own son, who’d died a POW, was a source of deep shame to his father. Imagine battling so long and so hard, surviving a Nazi death camp—Russian soldiers were starved without mercy—only to be charged as a traitor to the Motherland? (And the “samovars,” the limbless ones, were treated worst of all!) There are no words for such disgrace.

  Raya and I were very fortunate. With my high school German, I served as a “tongue” for our local commander. Each morning I sat by his side, translating Berliners’ complaints about food shortages, collapsing buildings, the lack of medical care, rapes, suicides, the rotting corpses everywhere. The commander settled every squabble—a thousand things you wouldn’t think of. Raya carried on directing traffic in the mess of the streets. Here’s a photo of her with her batons after the war.

  Yes, she was very beautiful. This was taken before the commander, at my insistence, hired her as caretaker for his growing menagerie: peacocks, dachshunds, breeder goats, a French-speaking cockatiel, and a prizewinning dairy cow named Thilde. Because our commander was a country boy at heart, our headquarters became a farmyard.

  Despite the difficulties—the ruins, the refugees—I look back on those days with a fond nostalgia. After Berlin was divided, Raya and I continued on in the East (she in a bottle factory; me as a language teacher) and quietly raised our son. Few people at the time would’ve believed we had a right to our happiness, and yet somehow, miraculously, we attained it. As time went on and our dear Osip grew into a fine young man, Raya and I joked that we had the best “marriage” of anyone we knew.

  Dear Visitor, the heart is immeasurable. Infinitely so. But I fear that Raya may have already passed to the shadows. What’s left for me now but to hope for one last miracle?

  Ernst Feuchtwanger

  Punk

  There’s a photograph of me at the old Stasi headquarters in Lichtenberg. I heard that they’d turned the place into a fucking museum, and I wanted to have a look. Back in the day, Liebchen, I was known as Roto, punk bassist for DEINE MUTTER!, the most notorious East German band of the seventies. That asshole of a tour guide said our band members were all Stasi agents. Wrong! Only three of the five of us were. Then he quoted a music critic who’d once described me as talentless as a surly bear. The tourists laughed when he said it, too, like it was the most fucking hilarious thing they’d ever heard. I had half a mind to stop them in their tracks and yell: We did our patriotic duty and now you have the nerve to ridicule us?

  I was thirty-five when that picture was taken, though I looked a lot younger. I had a nice head of hair then, enough for a Mohawk. The piercings hurt like hell, I’m not gonna lie—and they got fucking infected all the time—but the girls loved ’em. Nee, I wouldn’t call myself a musician. Three or four chords were all it took. The rest was attitude. Liebchen, what do you think I was doing? Spying on the underground. Protecting our country from destabilizing elements. My biggest strength was recognizing people’s weaknesses. Still is. I can look at you right now—mousy, not one for the limelight, sensitive antennae—and know you trust nobody. Who stole from you? Your daddy? I knew it. I told you I was good. Shrinks got nothing on me.

  Sicher, I locked away my share of delinquents. No spook rings or anything like that, but I did a good job. Enough to get me promoted to the number two position in the Degenerate Artists Unit. What?! I’m gonna ignore that remark since you’re not from around here. Listen up. We targeted subversives, saved the country time and again, exploited political hostilities to our advantage. Those were our glory days, Liebchen. And it all came crashing down with the Berlin Wall. Communism abandoned us. That’s right, we Stasi were loyal to the bitter end—on high alert, waiting for the order to crack heads, to do whatever was necessary. But the order never came. They sold us out big time. Big. Time.

  Fortunately, I managed to destroy my files, then slipped over to the West and started a new life. Most agents weren’t so lucky. I know ex-Stasi who are living on the streets of Berlin. Drinking, mostly. They couldn’t adapt. The world we knew was flipped over like a fucking fried egg. You know, there was a time when nobody could touch us. Not the KGB. Not the Gestapo. Not even SAVAK. And we didn’t have the, eh, publicity those organizations had. That’s part of what made us so great. Even your hotshot Castro came to us for advice.

  Liebchen, if I sound proud, it’s because I am proud. We had our bad apples, like anywhere else. Hey, corporations have a helleva lot more psychopaths than we ever did. When you were inside the Stasi, the way I was for twenty-three years, you were a made man. For someone of humble origins like me, you couldn’t go any higher. My father had been a train porter his whole life. A month after he retired, he dropped dead taking a nap in the garden. Mutti swears it’s because he stopped moving.

  After the shitstorm, I began selling fancy eye equipment to hospitals in the West. I started off with Swiss slit lamps and operating microscopes, then moved on to optical coherence tomography machines at sixty thousand euros a pop. Hell, yeah. You better believe I’m a quick study. My commissions got this fat in no time. I was living the high life, all-out bourgeois—ha! Nee, I don’t play bass anymore. A few of the old songs still run through my head, though: “Sigfrieda Is a Punk Rocker,” “The KGB Took My Baby Away.” Acknowledged, Liebchen, acknowledged. I never said we were the most original band on the planet. The Ramones were everyone’s gods in those days, not just yours. What the fuck? No way I’m gonna sing for you, or anyone else. Who the hell would’ve bought medical equipment from me if they’d known I was the badass formerly known as Roto?

  Friends? Not too many left. Never married either, though there’s someone I see on a regular basis. She isn’t my Freundin exactly, but we get together on weekends for an hour or two and have a fine-enough time. That’s all I’m gonna tell you, goddamit. I’m not one of those guys who looks back on his life with a shitload of regrets. My blood pressure’s on the high side and my kidney stones act up now and then, but that’s about it. Like I said, I’m living an easy retirement. Liebchen, how many ex-Stasi punk rockers do you know who can say that?

  Ulla Gräf

  Zhukov (Secret) Admiration Society for Ladies

  So, you’ve found me. You’re certainly persistent, I’ll grant you that. Bitte, forgive my reluctance, but the subject is a sensitive one. It’s true that I’m president of the Zhukov (Secret) Admiration Society for Ladies. Ja, I’m the last member since Hedy passed away four years ago. She and I used to go regularly to the German-Russian Museum in Karlshorst to view the film clip we knew by heart: that of Germany’s unconditional military surrender to Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov on May 8, 1945.

  Ah, that was the commander’s finest hour! To understand Berlin, the war, everything, you absolutely must see it. Dear Georgy betrays no emotion in this extraordinary footage, behaving with the dignity that befits a man of his stature—the brilliant Russian strategist who never lost a battle. We invite the German delegation to sign the act of capitulation. Sicher. He was the opposite of the Reich’s repellant, arrogant, doomed leaders. Why, those criminals had the
hubris to balk even at the moment of surrender! Afterward my Georgy danced the russkaya until dawn with his cheering generals.

  Selbstverständlich, my admiration for him is boundless. This is beside the point, but don’t you agree that Georgy was an exceptionally handsome man in his prime? The dimple in his chin, his clear-eyed gaze, the keen intelligence in his bearing—a peasant intelligence refined by experience and honor. To think that as a youth, he’d been apprenticed to a furrier in Moscow! Lucky for history, he was conscripted into the Red Army, launching a career that entranced me as a schoolgirl, despite the vicious propaganda against him. Kind Visitor, I refused two marriage proposals as a young woman—and that was when men were scarce. Nobody, nobody could ever compete with my Georgy.

  You must understand that I still take great pains to conceal my devotion, especially with my neighbors. For how could I publicly admit to loving the man who broke the back of the Wehrmacht, who killed our fathers and grandfathers, whose soldiers violated our mothers? Impossible. Personally, I don’t believe that the excesses of his troops should taint Georgy himself. What I consider most important is the man’s genius, his raw energy, the taste of his name on my tongue. Such an affliction I suffer!

  Hedy went so far as to suggest that Georgy might very well have been my father. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, Kind Visitor. Unsurprisingly, Georgy was something of a ladies’ man. He’s known to have sired three daughters with three different women—and there were rumors of several more. Why couldn’t I have been one of them? Take a good look at my face. Closer. Don’t you see how Georgy lives on in my gaze, in my bearing? In truth, the identity of my biological father remains a mystery. After the war, Mutti tried to cover this up by marrying a sullen Finnish sailor who formally adopted me.

  My favorite story about Georgy? There are countless. How could I possibly choose? Ah, well, there was that time Stalin was thrown from his Arabian stallion and angrily decreed: “Let Zhukov take the parade!” Meaning the victory parade. He fully expected that Georgy, too, would be thrown from the horse and publicly humiliated. But on a tip from Stalin’s younger son, Georgy spent days mastering the stallion. As the band played “Glory to You!” thousands of veterans marched in the rain to Red Square and hurled the Nazi banner at Stalin’s feet. Georgy, magnificent as ever, rode Stalin’s horse without incident to the roar of the adoring crowd.