Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories

by Naomi Kritzer

  And then I went home and dumped Peter, because really, if Meg was right about Honecker, she was probably right about the STD.

  *

  On the first of November, I started watching for Meg, but she didn’t come.

  She didn’t come on the second, either. I spent hours sitting around the student center, figuring that would make me easy to find. I tried the library. I tried the computer center, in case there was something about the time travel magic that meant she couldn’t come the same place twice.

  Meg hadn’t told me what time on the 9th the Wall was going to fall (and really, what did she mean, fall? It was a huge, solidly-built, thoroughly reinforced wall; even an earthquake was unlikely to make much of a dent in it) but if I flew on the 7th, even with delays I ought to be there in time to see it. The 9th was going to be a Thursday, so I decided that it made sense to just stay until Sunday, the 12th, and fly back then.

  I mean, that’s what would make sense, if I went.

  My parents expected me to call on Sundays. I could call them on the 4th and tell them that the 12th was going to be a really busy day for me and I might not call until late, or even Monday, and they wouldn’t even have to know I’d been to West Germany until I’d come back.

  The cheapest way to get to Berlin turned out to be convoluted: I had to fly from Minneapolis to Newark, Newark to Rome, and then Rome to Berlin. “I’m going to think about it,” I said.

  The travel agent looked at me, disappointed. “You should know that this is a really good fare and it won’t last long. If you think for more than an hour or two it will probably be gone. That’s how international fares work.”

  “Oh,” I said, daunted.

  “The fare if you fly KLM is more than twice as much.”

  It was $557.35 once you’d added the taxes and fees and so on. That didn’t seem cheap to me, but when I considered how much the Paris program had cost . . . “Can you tell me where the cheapest place is to stay in West Berlin?”

  “There are youth hostels that charge about $6 a night. In Deutsch Marks, of course. Have you ever traveled internationally before?”

  “No.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you so eager to go to West Berlin right now? There are many West German cities that are a lot more beautiful.”

  “I have a premonition that the Wall is going to fall next week,” I said, wondering how crazy it would sound to say it out loud.

  “Next week?” The travel agent raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Well, if you’re right, that should be really exciting. If you’re wrong . . . I don’t think international travel is ever wasted.” She smiled. “Do you want the ticket?”

  Five hundred and fifty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents. I swallowed hard, but what was stopping me wasn’t really putting that on my credit card, it was explaining it to my parents later. I knew someone who had five hundred dollars of debt on her credit card just from impulse purchases at the Renaissance Festival. Someone else who’d bought a computer. I’d asked around, you see, after that first abortive trip to the travel agency.

  This is my life. Not my mother’s.

  I would have felt better if I could have gotten another pep talk from Meg. But I didn’t see her outside the travel agency door, lurking. I was going to have to do this by myself.

  I took a deep breath and put my credit card on the travel agent’s desk. “Yes.”

  *

  Meg turned up on the 5th.

  “I brought money,” she said. “You don’t want to know what it took to get hold of a bunch of hundred-dollar bills that were printed in the 1980s, but I managed it.”

  “Awesome,” I said. “I can deposit this in my bank account and use it to pay off my credit card bill when it comes.”

  She stood for a second like she hadn’t quite heard me. “You’re going to go?”

  “I bought my ticket.” I’d been carrying it with me (out of fear I’d somehow misplace it), and I pulled it out and laid it on the table. “I’m flying on the 7th. Good enough?”

  Meg stared down at my tickets in disbelief. “You are awesome, Maggie!”

  “Are you allowed to say that? If I’m actually you?”

  She shook her head. “You are so much more awesome than I ever was.”

  “How much money is this?”

  “It’s a thousand dollars even.”

  “I’ll be able to stay somewhere nicer than a youth hostel, then!”

  “I have a neighborhood in mind, once we get to Berlin. I’ll have to meet you there.” She grinned. “I managed money, but coming up with a passport with a current picture and an acceptable expiry date would have been a lot more tricky. Have you figured out what you’re going to tell Mom?”

  “I’m not going to tell her until I get back. I told all my teachers I have a premonition that the Berlin Wall’s going to fall, and I want to see it happen. If I’m right they’ll all let me make up what I miss.”

  She grinned at me wildly, and handed me the money. “I’ll see you in Berlin.”

  Meg found me as I waited for the U-Bahn—the West Berlin subway train. “Do you have a plan?” she asked.

  “I have a guidebook,” I said, showing it to her. “Do you have a suggestion?”

  “Forty years from here I’d know right where to go. In 1989 . . . Kreuzberg. That’s the neighborhood near Checkpoint Charlie.”

  The streets of Kreuzberg didn’t look like how I pictured West Germany. It was a poor neighborhood, with a huge population of immigrants. “Forty years from now, this is one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Berlin,” she said.

  I looked around. “Are you saying I should invest in real estate?”

  She laughed. “Is it ethical to ask for investment advice from the future?”

  “I don’t know. It probably depends on how certain you are I’m heading to the same future you live in.”

  “Fair enough. Apple stock: buy in the early 1990s. It’ll be cheap and everyone will tell you you’re nuts. And then stick with it. It’s not until the early 2000s it’ll start bouncing back. Also, if you get a chance to invest in Google, do it. “

  “Isn’t Googol a one followed by a hundred zeros?”

  “In 1989, yes.” We stopped at a traffic light and I adjusted my backpack. “Of course, maybe I’ve stepped on a butterfly while I’ve been here and when you get to the future, everyone will use Amigas. I wouldn’t count on it, though.”

  We found a clean, cheap hotel and checked in. “You can take a nap if you want,” Meg said. “You’ll be up all night on the 9th so if you don’t switch to German time it’s probably just as well.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “I’m in West Germany and you want me to take a nap? You’d probably have suggested I spent my layover in Rome napping, too.”

  “You had a layover in Rome?” she said, surprised.

  “Yes, and I went and saw the Coliseum.” I opened the dresser drawer and emptied most of my backpack into it, changed into a clean shirt, and then put my much-lighter backpack back on. Now that I’d committed to the adventure, instead of feeling terrified—as I’d expected—I was feeling utterly exhilarated. “West Berlin has sights. Do you want to come?”

  “I have to,” she said. “If you get more than a quarter mile from me I go back to the future.”

  *

  I’ll spare you the catalog of places I went that day, except for one: the Wall. It was, Meg pointed out, our last chance to see it that way. There was a spot with an observation platform so we could look over, and Meg and I stared across the border.

  The Wall was shocking to look at. On the western side, it was covered in graffiti. On the eastern side, the tall buildings near the Wall had their west-facing windows bricked over, to ensure no one tried to jump to freedom. There had been huge protests in East Berlin for days, but nothing we could see from where we stood. When we passed Checkpoint Charlie, Meg prodded me to take a picture of the sign that said YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR. I could h
ave gone to East Berlin—they would issue a visa for a quick trip quite readily—but Meg had no passport, so we didn’t.

  The evening of the 9th, Meg was jumpy, and kept looking at her watch, like she thought the Wall might collapse while she wasn’t paying attention. “They aren’t actually going to tear it down for another week or two,” she said. “Tonight’s when the border opens.”

  Meg checked her watch while we were eating dinner. “The news conference is happening about now,” she remarked.

  “Is this something we can watch?”

  “No. It’ll be aired on West German TV in a bit. Gunther Schabowski—the Politburo spokesman—is giving a news conference. He’s going to read a note he was handed earlier, which he didn’t quite understand, that says revisions have been made to the travel laws that will make it possible for any citizen to exit at any border crossing. One of the journalists will ask him when this goes into effect and he will say ‘immediately.’” She checked her watch again. “About an hour from now there will be wire stories saying that the Berlin Wall has been opened.”

  “Has it?”

  “No. That will happen a little before midnight.”

  I looked out the window at the calm, chilly night, and wondered how dumb I’d feel about all this if she was wrong.

  Back in our hotel room, we watched a soccer match. When it was done, the evening news came on. I couldn’t follow it, but Meg translated: the lead story was about the news conference. They showed a clip of a man in a gray suit peering through glasses at a note, and then cut to images of the Wall, which still looked deserted. “This is how the East Berliners will hear about it,” Meg said. “They’re not supposed to watch the West German news, but everyone does anyway.”

  We put our coats back on and walked back to Checkpoint Charlie. West Berliners were gathering, though not many yet. From the east side, we could hear an announcement through a loudspeaker. The noise from the other side grew as the crowd swelled. There was chanting—Open the gate, Open the gate. No gunfire. Yet.

  There was a sense of breathless anticipation among the West Germans, and more than a little fear, as the crowd on the other side grew. The East Berliners were packed in against the gate, and if the guards opened fire it would be a bloodbath—the first casualties would be to bullets, the next casualties would be to the stampede.

  Open the gate. Open the gate.

  Beside me, Meg gripped my hand.

  *

  At 10:45, the East German border guards at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint gave up: they opened the gate, and let the East Berliners flood through. The other checkpoints followed suit within minutes.

  Where you are, in the future, this isn’t a surprise. Because November 9th, 1989, is for you the night the Wall came down. If you’re my age, you watched the TV footage. If you’re younger than me, you probably still watched the TV footage but you watched it on some archive, maybe on your pocket computer, maybe for History class.

  I was there.

  The first people through looked utterly stunned with disbelief. They’d been some of the first to the border crossing: if the guards had panicked and opened fire, they’d have died in a hail of bullets, unable to retreat because of the crowds behind them. They’d spent hours not knowing what was going to happen, and now—now they were being grabbed in hugs and handshakes by West Germans who were crying with joy. They were being handed glasses of champagne and mugs of beer and bouquets of flowers and West German money so that they could go buy their own beer and champagne and flowers.

  People were crying and singing (and drinking, of course) and taking pictures and cheering.

  At some point a group of West Germans about my age climbed up on top of the Wall; this seemed like a good idea and both Meg and I scrambled up with them. A group of East Germans climbed up to join us. Someone had music and we all danced together in an amazing dance party of joy and freedom, and I knew: even if I failed every class and my parents disowned me, this moment was worth it.

  I looked at Meg, to tell her so, and I noticed that she was craning her neck to look for someone, her face dark with worry. Then the clouds cleared as she seized hold of a young man who’d been dancing a few feet away. “Come,” she said to him in German clear enough that even I could understand. “Let’s go somewhere in West Berlin, an all-night cafe, maybe. I’ll buy us a midnight snack.”

  *

  His name was Gregor, he was an East Berliner, and he spoke English, although it was halting and heavily accented. He was nineteen, like me, and he wanted to ask me questions about the U.S. and what I was doing in Germany, which would have been difficult to explain even without the language barrier.

  Meg didn’t talk much. Mostly, she stared at Gregor. I couldn’t quite unpack the look on her face, but she was gripping her hands together very tightly as he ate. (He was ravenous, actually; he’d been about to eat a late dinner when the news came on, and he’d headed to the border crossing without food. And then been stuck there in the crowd for hours.)

  “Gregor,” Meg said abruptly, as he was finishing his sandwich. “I need you to make me a promise.”

  “Oh?”

  “Promise me that you will never take up smoking.”

  It was such a random request that I started laughing, and Gregor looked at me and said, in English, “Who is this? Is she your mother?”

  “She’s from from the future,” I said. “She makes predictions.”

  Gregor didn’t seem to entirely understand this but he gave her a bemused look and said, “Can you make a prediction?”

  “Yes,” she said, sharply. “East and West Germany will unify on October 3rd, 1990. And if you start smoking, you will be dead before you’re 45.” She stood up abruptly. “Excuse me.” She strode off toward the bathroom.

  Gregor gave me a look of wide-eyed hilarity. “Thank you very much for the meal,” he said. “If the border stays open and I can come again, I would like to see you again but I am not so sure about your friend!”

  “I can’t say I blame you,” I said.

  He scribbled down his address in East Berlin on a napkin and then asked, “Can I look for you here at this restaurant? Tomorrow night? How long are you staying in Germany?”

  “I have a ticket to go home on Sunday. I’ll come here tomorrow night,” I said. “I’ll wait for you.”

  “Yes,” he said, an incandescent smile lighting his face. “You wait for me. Your friend, see if you can persuade her to see the sights!”

  “That’s a really good idea,” I said, grinning.

  Meg came back a few minutes later, red-eyed, and silently paid the bill. We walked back to our hotel in silence.

  In our room, I said, “You know him.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s the person you really came back to find.”

  She was staring at the wall of the hotel room, her face fixed. “Yes.”

  “All of this—talking me into coming, paying for my ticket—was really about Gregor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to see him. One last time.”

  *

  In the future, Meg and Gregor had met when they were forty. Too late for kids, she said, and when I made a face she laughed softly and didn’t pursue it. They’d met at work, at the public health non-profit she’d mentioned; she’d been in policy, he’d been doing some sort of research. It had been a wild and intense romance, and they’d married just four months after they met. “Mom had a conniption, of course,” she said, “but I did at some point learn to just ignore those.”

  But then Gregor died, at 44, of lung cancer. It was, Meg was certain, because of the cigarettes.

  “So what if introducing us now was a mistake?” I said. “What if, by throwing us at each other here, now, today, we annoy the piss out of each other and we won’t want anything to do with each other when we meet at 40, if we even do?”

  “I thought about that,” Meg said. “But I decided if I could talk him into not smoki
ng, if he could have a long life . . . it would be worth it. Even if he had that life with someone else.”

  I thought about Gregor, and that brief glimpse we’d had of each other. I could certainly imagine sleeping with him. It was hard to imagine marrying anybody, but not any harder than it was to imagine myself as old as Meg.

  “We used to fantasize about meeting . . . here,” she said, waving her hand at West Berlin, out our window. “I mean, I really did have a premonition, actually, that the Wall was going to fall. Everyone else said ‘maybe someday!’ and I was thinking, It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen really soon. I thought about coming . . . but I didn’t. Because of the money, because of Mom . . . anyway. He was here, of course, and he told me about it: waiting those dark hours at the gate, dancing on the wall, how hungry he was! I knew if I could find him, all I’d have to do was offer him some dinner and he’d follow me anywhere. I didn’t really think . . . past that.”

  “And so that’s what you did.”

  “It wasn’t like I imagined,” she said, her voice a little hollow. “It’s him, and it’s not him, and seeing him like this . . .”

  “Especially since he looks at you, and sees someone the age of his mother.”

  “Well, yes and no. He looks at you and he sees . . .”

  “Just stop,” I said. “Don’t mess with my head any more than you’ve already done.”

  She fell silent.

  “Where did you get the time machine, anyway?” I said. “Meddling with the past can’t possibly be legal.”

  “Well, it doesn’t change anything for us, you know. My Calculus grade will always be a D.”

  “And Gregor will stay dead for you?”

  “Yes. He’s dead in my world.”

  “You came all this way . . .”

  She shrugged. “It was Gregor who built it. His last project. It seemed fitting . . . to use it to go to him.” She gave me a crooked smile. “This is my last visit. You won’t see me again until, one day, you’ll see me in your mirror.”