by Rose Tremain
He took small roads out of Prenzlauer Berg and the streets were mainly deserted. These days, East Berliners trekked into the West to see what their few D-Marks would buy. He saw what they came back with: coloured shoelaces and luminous condoms. A lot of what they chose seemed to be a bright, fearful pink or a harsh lime green, and these objects reminded Hector of the day when he’d been stopped by a group of ‘Wessies’, dressed in pink and green shell suits, who had asked him the way to Alexanderplatz.
‘What have you come to see?’ he’d asked them, more out of habit than out of interest, and they had laughed and swigged expensive beer and said: ‘Oh, we’ve come to the East German closing-down sale! Many bargains. Everything must go.’ And it had been at this moment and not at any other that Hector S. had decided to leave his country and leave Ute and cycle to Russia. He said to himself, I’m not going only because I’m afraid – afraid of what punishments may be meted out to men like me, who have followed orders and done their duty – I’m also going because these people make me feel sick.
He joined the Leninallee and pedalled towards Lichtenberg. His back ached with the heaviness of the knapsack and the awkwardness of his rifle. Elvira was buried in the Socialists’ Cemetery at Lichtenberg and it now occurred to Hector to make a small detour to look one last time at his mother’s grave. He thought that he would confide to her his passion for Ute and in this way try to leave it behind. In her life, Elvira had relished confidences, licking her sensual lips . . . ‘Oh, so delicious, Hecti! Tell me more!’
When he reached the cemetery, he couldn’t remember where Elvira’s grave was. There were so many hundreds of people buried here and he hadn’t visited the place in five years. He knew he could spend hours looking for Elvira and then it would get dark and he’d still only be on the outskirts of Berlin. This would be a stupid way to waste the first day of his long journey.
Then he found her: Elvira S. 1931–1980. A small polished stone. Hector parked his bicycle and took off his knapsack and rifle, flexing his shoulders. He removed his hat and stood, measuring the stone in his mind. The stone looked smaller than her. Did the state stone cutters cheat on everyone by a few centimetres? And if they did, was this a thing of importance? Probably not. There were so many hundreds of millions of dead under the earth, it was amazing there was any earth left on which to grow cabbages or build kindergarten schools.
Before he could form any thoughts or words on the subject of Ute, Hector was disturbed by movement quite near him. He turned and looked, and saw that a young man, poorly dressed, was going from grave to grave with a trowel, brazenly digging up the bulbs planted on them and putting them into a plastic carrier bag. The youth didn’t seem to have noticed Hector – a figure of authority in a winter uniform – or else had noticed him and was now deliberately taunting him with his distasteful little crime.
‘Hey!’ called Hector. ‘Don’t do that!’
The youth looked up. A white face, blank, without expression. No fear in the eyes.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘Border Police,’ announced Hector.
‘Border Police?’
‘Yes.’
The youth stood up straight and laughed. ‘Border Police! The border is down, or didn’t anyone tell you? You mean they didn’t tell you?’
‘Please leave,’ said Hector, ‘before I have you arrested.’
The youth didn’t move. He made an obscene gesture with his hand. ‘You leave!’ he said. ‘You fuck off out of my world!’
Hector was used to insults. Insults had been part of his life for seven years and now they troubled him no more than a few flakes of snow, say, or a shower of leaves blown across his path by the wind. Except that, under normal circumstances, he had his rifle with him and at this moment his rifle was a few feet away, leaning against a tree.
‘You are stealing flowers from the dead,’ said Hector.
The youth had a high-pitched laugh, the laugh of a girl. ‘Ah, you think the dead planted them, do you, Border Guard? You think they stuck their bones up into the soil to make little holes for these bulbs?’
‘This is a graveyard . . .’ began Hector.
‘It is?’ said the youth. ‘Oh, I thought it was a Communist rubbish dump. It contains the scum who made our lives a misery and a farce for forty years. But it’s changing now, right? Every fucker in here was wrong! And I tell you what they’re going to do with this place. They’re going to bring in the bulldozers and dig up these stiffs and use them to put out Russian reactor fires and then when they’ve vacated it, they’re going to—’
Hector walked three paces to his right and picked up his rifle. The click the youth heard was the release of the safety catch. The click stopped the flow of words and the pale face looked blank once again.
‘Leave,’ said Hector. ‘Leave now.’
‘OK, OK,’ said the youth and put up his hands, one of which still held the bulb bag. The putting up of hands was a gesture which Hector had been trained to ignore when necessary. He aimed the rifle at the youth’s groin.
‘Hey,’ said the youth, ‘don’t kill me! I know you bastards. Don’t kill me!’
‘Go then,’ said Hector. ‘Go.’
The youth tried to walk away backwards, keeping his eyes on Hector’s gun. He stumbled over a grave and fell down, and the bag of bulbs dropped out of the hand with which he tried to save himself. Then he got to his feet and ran.
So there were no confidences shared with Elvira, nothing to make her lick her lips, or bring on one of her storms of weeping. And Ute wasn’t left behind, but was carried onwards in Hector’s heart.
Hector was sitting now in a café in Marzahn, the last housing estate in East Berlin, built to accommodate 160,000 people in 60,000 apartments, 2.6 humans to a unit. Beyond Marzahn were the Brandenburg Marshes and the wide open sky.
Hector had come to the café because after what happened at the cemetery, he’d started to feel chilly. He sat at a plastic table with his hands round a cup of coffee and the life of the café went on as if he weren’t there. He hoped that, in Russia, people would talk to him more, in whatever language they could muster. He really didn’t want these familiar small sufferings – feeling cold inside, being ignored by people in public – to go on for the rest of his life. But nor would he ever pretend to be something other than what he was. It wasn’t his fault if ideologies had a finite lifespan, if his world was falling away like flesh from a bone, a little more each day. He’d been a Communist and a patriot. He wanted to stand up in this cheap Marzahn café and say: ‘My name is Hector S. and, to me, the word “patriot” is not a dirty one.’
He sat in the café for a long time. He smoked four Karos. He went to the toilet and pissed and washed his face and hands in warm water. He stole a wedge of paper towels and put them into his overcoat pocket. He’d been told by a colleague that one of the marvels coming to East Germany in the near future would be toilet rolls printed with crossword puzzles.
Then he went out into the early afternoon and saw that it was later than he’d imagined and that a few lights were coming on in the tower blocks. Brought up to abhor waste, Hector admired the way East Germans used electricity. Light looked normal here. Across the wall, he’d seen it become more and more startling and chaotic. On the long night shifts, he used to stare at all the rippling and blinking neon and wonder if it could, in the end, by reason of its absolute pointlessness, create blank spots in the human brain.
Now, he was leaving all the city light behind. It would hang in the sky at his back for a while and he’d be able to turn round and see its faint glow and say, ‘That’s Berlin.’ And then it wouldn’t even be a glow and the flicker of his cycle lamp would be all that he had to see by.
He pedalled hard. The only weapon he would have against the cold was his own blood. He grew more and more hungry. On any ordinary trip, he would have stopped after two hours or so and opened one of the tins of spam. But he’d set a rule for this journey – one meal a day and only one – and
he was determined not to break it. So he just cycled on and the moon came up and then the stars. To banish thoughts about Ute and her swan, he started to whistle some old tunes he’d picked up from Elvira who liked to sing to herself while she did the ironing.
Before night, Hector stopped at a village and bought bread. By torchlight, by the side of the road, he made a meal of tinned meat, bread and pickles. He wished he’d remembered to bring a plate to eat off as well as the plastic cutlery. Certain things, he thought, we take for granted so absolutely that they become invisible to us – and a dinner plate is one such thing.
He smoked a Karo and lay back on the frosty grass and looked at the stars. The exhaustion he now felt was suddenly intense. He knew he should repack the opened food, wrapping the bread carefully in its paper to keep it fresh for tomorrow. He knew also that he should search for some shelter, a shack or barn in which to sleep. But he couldn’t move. He could barely lift his arm to stub out his cigarette.
So he closed his eyes. Some voice in him said, sleep, Hector. Sleep itself has warming properties. You’ll be safe and everything will be safe till morning.
Hector was woken when the cold air of the night turned to mild but steady rain. There was enough light in the sky for him to see that a black slug was hanging off his tin of meat. He knew that he ought to remove the slug and return what was left of the meat to his knapsack, and that his ability to survive this journey depended upon such small acts of determination, but he felt incapable of eating meat that had been sucked at by a slug.
He saw now that he’d been lying by the side of a road and that at his back was a wood. Going into the wood to relieve himself, he noticed that a narrow path ran between the trees, more or less parallel with the road. A red-and-yellow sign, nailed to an oak tree, said ‘Fitness Path’ and depicted a man in the attitude of a runner. Hector decided to follow the Fitness Path. Here, he would be protected from the rain and, for as long as the track ran roughly level with the road, he wouldn’t get lost. Also, he liked the idea of coming across athletes. They were a category of people he admired: patriotic, stoical and sane. He couldn’t imagine an athlete stealing bulbs from graves or doing crossword puzzles on toilet paper.
By his calculations, he had about a hundred kilometres to cycle before he reached the Polish border, and if his pace was steady, he expected to do this in two or three days. He hoped the beautiful forest would go on and on, right to the edge of his country. He took a long drink of water. Despite his short sleep, he felt revived, almost happy. Why, he thought, was I the only one of all my friends in the Border Police to go east? He imagined his old colleagues now, trying to sleep through this wet dawn, but most of them awake in fact, listening to the traffic beginning, listening to their blood beating, and none of them knowing which to worry about more – the past or the future.
Hector met no athletes. And, to his disappointment, the Fitness Path quite soon veered north and he was forced to rejoin the road or risk becoming lost. But by this time the sun was starting to glimmer through the rain clouds, making the road shine, and Hector’s contentment didn’t really diminish. It stemmed, he decided, from an acknowledgement of his own bravery. Bravery was the word. Most people in East Germany had their eyes turned towards the West, as if they were kids in a cinema queue and the West were the last show on earth. Only he, Hector S., had the courage and the vision to ride east towards the Russian winter, towards the wilderness.
He stopped at a public wash-house to shave and shower. Keeping clean was something he intended to do. He loved showers. He habitually masturbated under the shower, as did his father since the death of Elvira, and didn’t care if anyone saw him do it. But here, the streams of hot water only soothed the ache in his back and in his calves, and he had no erection. The most significant thing that he had to deny himself on this journey was Ute. He knew that his sanity and his ability to keep his resolve depended on this. Only when he arrived at his destination, wherever that turned out to be, would he get out the photograph of Ute leaning on the stool and take her from behind, as often as he felt inclined. And if his yearning for her then – for the real Ute, with her soft hair and her cunt that tasted of the sea – became serious like an illness, he would send for her.
He left the wash-house with bright pink skin and wearing clean underwear. He went to a village café for coffee and a sweet cake and, although it was still early in the morning, there were old people dancing here, on the wooden café floor. The band consisted of an accordionist and a double bass player, and these two were also old. Hector stared around him. On they danced, partner with partner, men with women, women whose men had died or been mislaid dancing together, all smiling and proud of the way they could still move their feet. Hector now realised that he was the only young person in the café and he wondered whether he was in some old persons’ club and had only been served out of deference to his uniform. He closed his eyes. The music was jaunty and light. A country where old people can dance in the morning must be a good country. And Hector imagined how this music could beckon people from their beds and that instead of lying under their feather quilts waiting to die, they would examine their dancing shoes for signs of wear, comb what remained of their hair, put on a shawl or a coat and walk down to the café, humming or whistling. Yet soon this scene would be annihilated by history. Hector opened his eyes and said quite loudly to an old woman who had sat down at the next table: ‘This dance café will be closed.’
She hesitated. Had Hector just uttered an order? You could never predict what extraordinary orders were going to come out of the mouths of uniformed men. Once, she had been stopped on her way to the butcher’s and told to remove her wig.
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Hector. ‘It will be closed. In less than a year. This place will become a discotheque. They will play Western music here, pop and rock and rap, and nobody in this village will sleep, ever again. And nor will you old people dance.’
Hector had finished his coffee and cake. He didn’t want or expect a reply. He’d said what he wanted to say and now he would just leave. The old woman stared at him as he got up and shouldered his knapsack and his rifle. The musicians watched him and the dancing couples watched him, but nobody spoke out. When Hector emerged into the street, it was raining again, a light but steady rain.
Living in this way, off his meat and dill pickles, spending a little money on hot coffee and bread, and sleeping on the good German earth, Hector S. reached the Polish border.
He was perhaps forty kilometres inside Poland when he fell ill.
He fell ill from cold and exhaustion, and from something else he couldn’t name. The illness came over him just outside the town of G., when he found himself in a landscape of striped hills, strip-farmed plough and fescue grass. And coming towards him on the quaint ribbon of road was a funeral procession, led by a Catholic priest, holding a mighty cross. And it was as if he – with his bicycle and his rifle – were the only living thing in a terrible old painting and the low sunlight was the varnish on that painting, yellow and sickly. His legs, so strong when his journey had begun, felt suddenly hollow, the weight of the knapsack and rifle on his back unbearable.
And he could hear singing. It was the priest and all the mourners defying the Communist authorities by intoning some Roman Catholic hymn for the dead person, and to Hector this human music was more disagreeable, even, than one of Elvira’s attacks of weeping in the apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. It made his stomach heave.
He got off his bicycle and leaned his weight over the handlebars and the saddle. He wanted to get right away from the road, so that he wouldn’t have to come near the mourners nor smell their fusty clothes nor hear them breathing as they sang, but the striped hills on either side of the road were quite steep – too steep, in fact, for a man who has been stricken with sickness.
It occurred to Hector in the next second that he would have to shoot the Catholic mourners down. This was his duty. He would start with the priest
. But he felt a little confused by numbers: how many mourners and how many bullets? And confused by distance: optimum range for this calibre of rifle was . . . what? He once knew it by heart, just as a man knows his own name by heart. And then, he was suddenly confused by currencies and their terminology. Was ‘dollar’ a universal word, or was there a Polish word for ‘dollar’ that was not ‘dollar’ differently pronounced? Was a zloty a coin or was it a note? Was it a letter box? How many zlotys in a golden cross? How many letter boxes in a striped field . . . ?
Of course, Hector felt himself begin to fall, but a person falling may not reach the ground to his certain knowledge, but instead arrive somewhere else. Hector fell on to the grey tarmac of the ribbon road and the priest and the mourners, seeing a man in a foreign uniform lying in their pathway, came on steadfastly towards him.
Hector, however, is entering a different moment of time. He is reporting for duty . . .
It is summer, exquisite summer. It is dawn in East Berlin. Hector is entering the door at the base of a watchtower and he begins to climb up the concrete steps. Above him is the perfect octagonal of the tower itself, with its eight viewing windows. Every day, Hector notes and admires the simple yet solid and efficacious construction of the towers, so well designed for the task in hand, to enable the Border Guards to see everything going on beneath them. And now, once again, his heart is beating with pride, pride in the tower, pride in the duties which await him in the coming day. Up and up he goes. The steps are dark near the base, but as Hector climbs, he knows that when he enters the octagon – at that very moment – will be falling the extraordinary beauty of the dawn light, arriving from the East.