The wall was a bleak and ugly ploy in a loser’s game. NATO poured vast sums of money into the post–World War II Allied zones of control and beamed TV imagery of Western opulence unceasingly into the surrounding society, including parts of Prussia under Communist rule. Although West Berlin had a municipal government of sorts, each zone remained under official control of the occupying force to which it had been assigned after the war: French, English, and American. East Berlin was the designated Russian zone. The western section was an island of chaotic liberalism in a sea of repression and economic privation. An estimated one-third of East German citizens informed on the others for the Stasi secret police. None of them could get out.
The city was connected to West Germany by a four-lane umbilical cord, part of Hitler’s autobahn system, which passed through Prussian fields said to be mined. Access to this corridor was through a carefully watched but not-so-unusual border station. The agreement among the Allies that created the postwar city gave each occupying power right of access to the other zones. Every day, wall or no wall, a truckload of U.S. Marines in full battle gear passed through Checkpoint Charlie and travelled the streets of the East German capital, because they could. The East Germans, of course, guarded the wall with rigour. You could cross in either direction only at designated checkpoints. Any attempt to cross elsewhere would most commonly result in death, either from the rifle fire of the guards or from the land mines sown in the “death strip” between the wall’s two parallel halves.
After a couple of visits to West Germany, we were invited, as part of the next tour, to perform in the East, in Leipzig, Dresden, and Karlmarxstadt (now on maps under its original name, Chemnitz), and at the International Festival of Political Song in East Berlin. There was no system in place for the exchange of money between the West and the Soviet bloc, so the East Germans compensated us by covering our transatlantic travel. This meant that we had to come and go through their Schönefeld Airport. We were met by a wiry blond kid from Frankfurt, Gery, who was to be our driver for the tour. Bags and gear were loaded into his van, and we proceeded to Checkpoint Charlie, the main crossing point for non-Germans. Things were complicated by the fact that Gery had to drop us off and then cross at a different checkpoint. In the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, over wet cobblestones shining dark and deserted beneath overhead lamps, our little aggregation walked a block down the street and into a twisting sheep corridor of razor wire, and presented ourselves to the surprised guards. Our papers were in order, but foreigners didn’t usually appear at such an hour, without baggage and on the “wrong” side of the wall. We went through a few layers of scrutiny, each one less unfriendly than the one before. By the time we got to the last guard post, a smiling soldier told us he was going to hear us at the festival and asked for our autographs. Deep drifts of absurd irony gathered around us as we ambled out of a vale of tears that by then had been in total lockdown for more than twenty years.
Dull twilight spits hesitant sulphur rain
Sky been down around our ears for weeks
Only once—gap-glimpsed moon over that anal-retentive border wall
As we laughed through some midnight checkpoint under yellow urban cloud
Weeks of frantic motion—petrol veins of Europe pumping
Through scratchy acid-bitten transparent winter trees
Through brownish haze that makes a ghost of the horizon
I’m rushing after some ever-receding destination
Berlin tonight
Table-dancing in black tights
Waving a silver crutch in the blue lights
Shape-changing over glass
On the front line of the last gasp
Green shoots of winter wheat and patches of snow
Russian walks dog in Saxon field
From the top of a solitary tree like the one on the flag of Lebanon
Unblinking eye of hawk follows traffic on the autobahn
Tank convoy winds down smokestack valley
Proud chemical pennants wave against the sky
Turret gunner laughs when I throw up my hands
I’m all glasses and grin to him under my “commie” fur hat
“BERLIN TONIGHT,” 1985
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/58.
Shortly after returning from Germany I attended a briefing in Toronto by a group of Canadian church delegates, for the press and interested parties, about recent events in Honduras. By then I had been to Central America twice, but never to Honduras, which at the time was relatively stable, at least compared with Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. At the briefing I learned that the Honduran army had attacked a U.N. refugee camp full of Salvadoran civilians, inside Honduras near the border with El Salvador. U.N. camps had been attacked before, but this was the first time in the organization’s history that the act had been carried out by the army of a host country. A lot of rounds had been fired, but loss of life was confined to an old man who was shot and a baby who was kicked to death. The Honduran army had stayed around, though, instilling a fear of further violence. The church team happened to end up at the camp a day or two later, then travelled directly back to Canada with the news, so it was very fresh. No one else from the outside world yet had knowledge of this. I happened to be sitting next to Meyer Brownstone, the head of Oxfam Canada and my travelling companion in Chile. Meyer looked at me and said, “There needs to be an international presence on the ground right away. By the time the U.N. can get moving, it might be too late. We should get down there. What are you doing next week?” This was on a Wednesday. The following Tuesday, we were in Honduras.
Like the Yanks in Berlin, we went because we could. We had neither the bureaucratic nor the diplomatic encumbrances that would likely slow a U.N. response. Getting outside witnesses into the camp could make a critical difference to the survival of the refugees. There wasn’t time to waste on protocol.
Our group consisted of Meyer, a Toronto immigration lawyer named Jeff House, and me. In the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Meyer contacted the Canadian honourary consul, who turned out to be the former head of one of the country’s major banks and very well connected. He received us with smooth warmth, and we told him what we wanted to do.
“Well,” said the banker, turning a snifter of cognac between finely manicured fingers, “the army has cut off Colomoncagua, where the camp is located. They’ll never allow you through their lines. I have a friend who happens to be the general in charge of the armed forces. He is kind of on the outs. A group of younger officers is campaigning to get rid of him. They don’t feel he shows enough zeal when it comes to counterinsurgency matters. He’s still in charge, though, and might be persuaded to give you a letter of passage, just to spite his rivals.”
He made a call, and we went to see the general. He was an older man, sitting behind an untidy desk in his shirtsleeves. His eyes were yellowish and watery. He was a bit drunk and expressed no great concern for our mission, but he seemed pleased at the chance to assert his authority and screw the younger officers, who would surely have objected. If we’d gone through the prescribed channels, up the line, we would have been waiting in Tegucigalpa for a week for our papers, if we were granted access at all.
“Sure, you can do this,” he said, smiling, and wrote a letter granting us authority to visit the refugee camp, which he then stamped with his official seal.
That night there was a party at the home of an older American couple, friends of Meyer’s who were deeply involved in covert support work with the Salvadoran FMLN. It was an intimate and congenial gathering of mostly U.S. expats and visitors, and I played a couple of songs. Among the guests was an attractive young couple named Bob and Gracie Ekblad, who were engaged in agricultural development work, with a side of Bible study, among the poorest campesinos in the mountainous interior of Honduras.
The next morning the driver Meyer had found showed up with a battered white Land Cruiser, which subsequently splashed and smeared its way ove
r rutted red dirt roads, reduced to muck by recent rains, westerly, toward the border with El Salvador. Hours jostled by before we arrived at the tiny village of Colomoncagua. The hamlet is situated on top of a mountain. From the main street you can look west over the border at the green and rugged terrain of El Salvador, and right across that to the Pacific Ocean, stretching blue into the hazy horizon. Below, to the south and down a steep hill, lay the refugee camp, set out in tidy streets lined with canvas-roofed wooden structures.
Reaching the town meant penetrating a ring of troops. The soldiers at the checkpoint had doubtless heard the laboring low-range gears of the 4x4 from a long way off. A dozen or so slouched around a makeshift hut, M16s in hand. The hard young faces wore expressions of curiosity mixed with malice—uniformed gangbangers whose turf we had stumbled onto. A lift gate made of a stripped tree trunk blocked our path. In Spanish our driver explained the situation to the corporal who confronted us, handing him the letter from the general. The soldier made a great show of studying its contents, then said, “Well, yeah, okay,” and handed it back. He slung his rifle on his shoulder and raised the gate. I thought, “Let’s get out of here before someone who can read shows up.” He’d been holding the letter upside down.
It was late afternoon by the time we pressed uphill into Colomoncagua. We stayed in a guesthouse slung with hammocks, the only occupants. The house stood on the main street, beside the police station. We were warned to shake out our shoes in the morning before putting them on, as scorpions found them cozy. Such proximity to the police in a place like this made me more nervous than the possibility of arachnids in my boots. That and the hammock made sleep difficult. Deep into the night, sounds of laughter wafted in from next door. I finally drifted off, only to be jolted awake in the small hours by a blood-curdling scream. It was so close I felt as if it were in the room with me. I thought they must be torturing someone in the police post. I lay tense in the dark, barely breathing, waiting for more. It never came. In the morning I found out it had been a pig in the street outside. The sun was barely above the horizon, not yet hot, the morning air crisp and clear. Somebody said, “Look, they’re bombing over there!”
Colomoncagua refugee camp, me and Don Fergus
From our mountaintop vantage we watched a Cessna A-37 Dragonfly jet, developed by the U.S. military for the tight corners of Vietnam, make run after run at a small town mostly obscured by trees on the far side of the border, in the killing fields of El Salvador—“The Saviour,” a country named for Jesus Christ. The town’s church steeple stood gleaming in low yellow rays as the plane bellied above the rooftops and then blasted upward. In its wake, plumes of blackening smoke shot skyward, followed by a distant boom. The warplane climbed and banked steeply to swing back for another pass. From the time lag between the detonation of the bombs and the sound reaching us, we estimated the town to be ten or twelve kilometres away. Later, one of the Salvadorans we spoke with suggested that the town probably had no guerrillas in it, possibly even no people in it, and the pilots were just getting rid of their bombs where they wouldn’t get shot at. Apparently that was characteristic of the war in El Salvador.
Nonetheless, from 1980 to 1992, an estimated seventy-five thousand people died in this so-called civil war, which was more an imperial pogrom against the people of a chattel state. Most of the dead were civilians, whom Salvadoran army officers sneeringly referred to as “the masses.” During the early eighties the armed forces employed their U.S.-supplied weapons to slaughter up to ten thousand civilians a year.
The bombing raid made it into the second verse of “The Charity of Night,” the song whose first verse described my teenage encounter with the predator on the Stockholm bridge. I chose to make the witness a woman so I could frame the whole piece as a slowly unfolding love story. The word “she” is the only piece of fiction in the song, other than having the attack aircraft be plural. In the third verse there’s a coming together of the two characters—anima and animus, yin and yang—in the heat of this short span we call a life.
Slow revolution—1985—crosswise in a hammock in the
hot volcanic hills
It’s 3 A.M. the night after the air raid
From the ridge she watched A-37s, like ugly gulls,
Make a dozen swooping passes over some luckless town
Maybe ten klicks beyond the border
In the distance the Pacific glimmered silver
Now lascivious laughter floats on the darkness from the
police post next door —
Male voices—and a woman’s —
Little clouds of desire painted around the edges with rum
In the muddy street a pig suddenly screams
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean’s roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night
“THE CHARITY OF NIGHT,” 1994
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/1.
Heavily armed soldiers surrounded the refugee camp. There would be no sneaking into this place, as we did in Mexico, even had we wanted to, which we did not. The whole point of being there was to be visible, so that the higher-ups literally calling the shots would know the world was watching them.
On our arrival a small swirl of guns, boots, and olive drab eddied around our vehicle. Nobody looked happy to see us. The officer in charge could not read the letter either, but he recognized the general’s signature and seal, so he ordered an opening in the cordon of troops and in we went.
Bullet holes laced the rough-sawn walls of the flimsy houses. Honduran troops had swept through the camp, not targeting people directly but firing into houses to intimidate. The troops claimed they were looking for FMLN rebel fighters in the camp, but it was clear they were also trying to discourage further migration, which was in fact happening, as thousands of Salvadorans were desperate to get anywhere outside their own borders. The old man and baby were killed and others beaten up, but it could have been worse, and may have been had we not arrived when we did.
I wondered if the Hondurans were afraid that the large influx of refugees would lead to a confrontation with the Salvadoran military, which had easily beaten Honduras during the so-called Soccer War of 1969. No doubt FMLN guerrillas were inclined to move through this remote area. The military imposed a 5 P.M. curfew on the entire region outside town. The penalty for violating the curfew was death. Paramilitary squads hunted the countryside, looking for anyone outside between dinner and dawn. Even in your house, if a lantern burned too late, they might come after you.
The camp was similar to those I’d seen in Chiapas, only better supplied. The dwellings were more substantial, constructed with lumber and nails and tentlike canvas roofs. The refugees themselves were cautiously relieved at our arrival. They insisted on feeding us. They were doing everything they could to create some semblance of normalcy, though they faced difficult conditions, including an inadequate flow of food. They had a band—when you show up with a guitar, there always seems to be a band—and had made their own instruments: a string bass, several homemade fiddles, a cigar box guitar. Word went round and in a short time half a dozen players had shown up, and we jammed on a low, canvas-roofed stage. A tall, wiry old man whom everyone addressed as Don Fergus was both luthier and the main musician. He’d start a fiddle tune and everyone would jump in to play along, including me. People gathered around, enjoying the diversion.
We stayed two nights at the refugee camp and then left for the capital. There we ran into a U.N. inspection team, which had arrived in Tegucigalpa just after we left, and was attempting to make the same trek. They were visibly upset. Actually, furious. The army had been stonewalling them, and they blamed our unauthorized intervention for that. We were called irresponsible, meddlesome, and some other things. I doubt we ha
d added to their difficulties. Had it not been for our fortuitous contact we would have been faced with the same situation, so we sent them to the Canadian honourary consul. Meyer felt, and Jeff and I agreed, that there had been no time to lose. We were the first to find out, the ones who could arrive the quickest, and it seemed to me like Big Circumstance at work.
Back in Toronto, media response to the tale of our Honduran adventure was disappointingly sluggish. I was invited to appear for an interview on a midday news show on CBC television. As the conversation progressed with no mention of the trip, I happened to catch a glimpse of the anchorwoman’s production notes, which read: “We have this commie fag sympathizer who wants to talk about Central American refugees and what a rough time they’re having. Nix on that. . . .” She waxed pretty embarrassed when she realized I had seen the cue sheet. I was quite put out.
I maintained some correspondence with the Ekblads. The following January I returned to Honduras to visit them. They had landed in Central America some years earlier as young, gung-ho Christian missionaries with a mind for spreading the Presbyterian Word and helping the poor in whatever ways they could. They quickly came to understand that food security was a major issue for the campesinos among whom they worked, as Honduras runs largely on a plantation economy. The massive sugar and banana farms, which occupy most of the good land, require the availability of seasonal labour. That availability is maintained by ensuring that the majority of small farmers must work land that can’t produce enough food for survival—if they have land to work at all. The only way they can feed their families is to join the cheap seasonal labour pool, earning just enough money to buy the food they can’t grow. “This shall be the System,” sayeth the colonizers. And so it remains.
The Ekblads began hosting Bible study classes, and that became an important element of a courageous and creative program of working alongside peasant farmers, developing agricultural techniques that would help them gain independence from the plantation treadmill. It was courageous because such work is considered subversive. Government thugs threatened, among other things, to torch their house in Minas de Oro, but they never quit.
Rumours of Glory Page 28