by Jeremy Tiang
He shrugs. “Call it what you like.” His English is excellent, with only a trace of accent. “Come up, come in, if you like. Why not?”
There are many reasons why not, but she finds herself testing the first step of the ladder, gripping a rung, easing herself up. The man waits, and offers her the hand which isn’t holding his cigarette. “Peter,” he says into her ear.
“Joy,” she offers in return. Now that she is up here, she can feel the music like a physical force, right through the thick walls and empty windows. He leads her through one of them into the room, still smoking, and she has the impression of hotel room furniture tortured by birds and rainwater, the passage of time, spiderwebs layered thickly over the ceiling. It’s hard to be sure how big the space is, it’s lit only by candles and a couple of incongruous anglepoise desk-lamps.
Peter hands her a beer. “Should I—?” She isn’t sure how to complete the question, but he shrugs again, in a comfortable way that suggests he does this a lot, popping the bottle open by slamming it against a table edge. She accepts it carefully, wiping the rim before putting her lips to it. “Vielen Dank.”
“You like this?” says Peter loudly, his hair gleaming like copper in the hazy light, and she nods. “My husband would be shocked if he knew I was in a place like this,” she says, enunciating carefully over the noise, wishing she remembered how to do the conditional tense in German. He smiles like a wolf to show he understands, his eyes drooping knowingly as if to say, You didn’t need to do that, in you I have no interest.
There are about twenty bodies in the space, mostly older than she’d have expected—some even in their thirties. They are dancing in a listless, bobbing kind of way, but then the music is some kind of European house, not really what she’d have expected, not all that different to a normal nightclub anywhere. Perhaps the location is the only subversive thing about this gathering. While stepping over the window sill, she’d made a mental note to refuse any drugs she was offered, but this now seems an unlikely contingency.
Peter is waving at a girl, who walks over to them. “My twin sister, Sigrid,” he says into her ear. She has the same shade of hair, also matted and unruly. Joy smiles uncertainly and she responds by leaning forward for an air kiss, which ends awkwardly as Joy can never decipher whether one or both cheeks are called for. “Not very rock and roll,” says Sigrid cheerfully, and drags them both onto the dance floor.
It’s been a while since Joy has danced. She can’t blame her marriage for this, or even turning thirty—she just fell out of the habit. It’s not something she’s particularly missed, but now that she’s here again, it’s surprisingly easy to fall back into the rhythm of it, looking at the other people in the group now and again, holding your beer so it doesn’t spill, remembering to move your legs and not just your arms and head. Peter and Sigrid are better at this, long-limbed and dextrous.
After twelve songs or so, Joy begins to feel bored, and this too is something she remembers from her clubbing days. Even when the melodies vary, all dancing ever seems to be is reaching for the beat and moving more or less in time to it. These are too samey to interest her, all cool detached topnotes with electronic riffs, as if a robot somewhere were assembling them out of parts. She looks at her watch, thinking she’ll go if it’s been more than an hour, but it’s too dark to see. She can keep going. It’s not dull exactly, but she wouldn’t be heartbroken to leave.
Around the third time she has this thought, when her beer is dangling emptily and she is wondering if it’s possible to get another one, Peter nods at the window and Sigrid smiles, and then all three of them are scampering down the ladder like children and in the damp night air. “Enough,” says Sigrid, as if instructing an apprentice. “The art of parties is knowing when to leave.”
“Who organises this?” says Joy, eliciting another shrug from Peter. “Someone. Some people. They come here from the town. There is not much happening here on Rügen, I think. They party and they leave. We heard about this from a friend. We came to look.”
“Where in Germany do you come from?”
“Where in Germany?” Peter mimics. “Stockholm. There in Germany. Did you think we sound German?”
Joy is about to apologise, though she isn’t sure for what, when they laugh and instead she asks, “How long have you been here?”
“On the island?” Peter shrugs. “We arrived yesterday. It’s easy for us to get here, Sweden is just over there.” He gestures vaguely towards the trees, to the dappled water beyond.
“Are you just here for the party?”
“What else?”
Joy starts to explain about her school sending her, but the alcohol seems to have thickened her tongue and the wind keeps snatching her voice away, and it takes a while. By now they have wandered far enough that the music is no longer audible. Peter produces three tins of beer from a pocket of his cargo pants and doles them out. She takes one. Why not?
“But then where are your students?” Sigrid wants to know.
“There are three other teachers. We’ve agreed to take turns having the night off.”
“Are they well-behaved?”
“The teachers? Oh, we all are, the students too. Singaporeans are famous for being well-behaved.”
“Oh, you are from Singapore.” Joy smiles warily, ready for the next question, which is usually something about chewing gum or how small the country is. Instead, Peter says thoughtfully, his head as if to study her from a different angle, “But you are not, Chinese? Sorry, I do not—”
“Eurasian,” says Joy. “There are a lot of races in Singapore.”
“What means Eurasian?”
She shrugs. “A mixture. A bit of Europe, a bit of Asia.” This is an over-simplification, but it seems to satisfy them. “I suppose you don’t have that where you are?”
“No,” says Sigrid, deadpan. “Everyone looks the same in Sweden. We can only tell each other apart by hair colour.”
They have reached a sandy, shallow slope, dotted with fir trees and swept by the unseen ocean. It is tempting to suggest a dip in the dark, but they were warned at the youth hostel about dangerous currents, and the water is probably cold. Already, the evening is falling into more orderly lines, and Joy instinctively knows that the single aberration of the not-quite-rave is all she has an appetite for. As they find a place to sit, she is aware of her sensible shoes, her glasses, her utter lack of what Sigrid would call “rock and roll”. But that is fine. She will have a nice chat with her new friends, and then head to bed.
“You are staying nearby?”
“In the Jugendherberge.” She gargles her r’s a little, which she has learnt makes her sound like a more proficient speaker.
“Oh.” Sigrid wrinkles her nose. “We passed by earlier. All neat, ping pong table and barbecue pit outside? I don’t know why people stay in this place.”
“It’s convenient. You come here to party.”
“That is different. The building is empty, ruined, we don’t pretend it’s fine, we see it and we dance. But that side—painted white, pretending it’s so nice and perfect, no.”
Joy takes a pull from her beer, not sure if she can formulate a coherent response.
“Do you know the history of this?” says Peter.
“Of course. We’re here to study the history. To experience the place.”
“My grandmother wanted to stay here,” says Sigrid unexpectedly. “I read her old diaries, when she died. She talked about Prora like it was paradise, from the pictures she saw. She said how great the Führer was, to build this. Cheap holidays for workers.”
“Kraft durch Freude,” says Joy.
“Freedom through happiness, yes. Bread and circuses.”
“Your grandmother?”
“She was German. So were my parents. They came to Sweden.”
“And now you’re staying here instead.”
“We thought we would see if there is any furniture left in the bedrooms,” says Peter. “But now I think we will sleep he
re. Siggy? Here it is nice.”
“If it does not rain.” Sigrid rests her head on Peter’s bony knee, her hair thrown back so it fans over his lap. He leans forward, his skinny back arching, and kisses her hard on the mouth. She raises herself on her elbows. When they are done, Peter winks at Joy. “She is not really my twin.”
“Did you say that?” Sigrid tilts her head back. “He does that sometimes. It is maybe amusing because we look quite similar.”
“You believed?” Peter waggles his ring finger at her. “Wife, not sister.”
“Congratulations” is all Joy can think to say.
“See how it turns out before you congratulate.”
Sigrid smacks him across the shoulder. “What is Singapore like, Joy?”
“Smaller than Rügen. Clean. I don’t know.”
“Do you have anything like this?”
“A five-kilometre-long concrete hotel built by Hitler? No.”
“Then no wonder you would come here to see it.”
Joy checks her phone. No messages or missed calls—everything must be all right. She is surprised by the time, later than she thought. They students will be asleep by now, or at least in bed. They have an early start in the morning, a visit to the museum and then a guided tour of those parts of the ruins it is safe to walk in. The ballroom, the many swimming pools, the dining hall designed to serve meals for twenty thousand in shifts. A sandwich lunch, provided by the youth hostel, and then back on the coach for their next destination. More history.
This is meant to be the most exciting part of her job, educational travel, but so far it has been largely pedestrian. The only requirement is they return with the same number of students they left with. So it’s just this evening—and she has a flash of how odd this is, like a movie, that she is here with these people. The Swedes are completely relaxed, as if they are used to the loose ebb and flow of people in the world. They enjoy her company—they must or they wouldn’t still be here—but she knows that at the end of the evening they will not be swapping e-mail addresses or promising to add each other on Facebook.
“Where will you go after this?” says Peter, combing Sigrid’s long hair with his fingers.
“We’ll head along the coast for a bit—to see the towers, the watchtowers—”
“Grenzturm.”
“Is that them? The ones they used to look out for people trying to escape.”
“Yes, Grenzturm. For anyone swimming to the West. They used to shine searchlights level with the water to spot them more easily. Still, people tried, and got shot. My aunt froze to death. She thought it would be easier in the winter.”
Sigrid volunteers this so matter-of-factly that Joy takes a moment to be sure she has heard it. “Your family was here?”
“My aunt married someone from here. My mother was in Berlin.”
“Which side?”
“East, of course. We were all in the East. She could see the wall from her bedroom window, when she was a girl. It was so close. But of course, not close enough to—There was a viewing platform on the other side. People from the West would stand there, waving over the wall, or just looking. Holding up placards like ‘Down with Communism’ or ‘We are solidarity with you’. My mother waved back sometimes. Then one day, she was looking, and you know, she saw—”
“She saw herself, a doppelgänger in the West,” says Peter, in his ghost-story voice.
Sigrid smacks him. “No. You are a dick. She saw her friend, Beata. Her best friend from school.”
“How did she get across?”
“She didn’t know. Of course, some people crossed, and you wouldn’t tell your friends before you went. Beata waved, but maybe not at her. She never saw her again. Later, they came and covered all the windows with bricks.”
“We’re going to Berlin, with the students. Leipzig, then Berlin.”
“Bernauerstrasse, my mother’s street. You should visit. There is still a platform there, and they have kept a part of the wall. For souvenir.”
“Did she ever get out?”
“No, she didn’t try.” Sigrid’s beautiful face is unreadable. Peter has tuned out, not unsympathetically, but Joy can tell he has heard this story before, more than once. “We left like everyone else, when the wall fell.”
“1990.”
“It’s funny, we heard it was happening, but I was going to school like normal and my mother had a cold so she said we should all sleep early that night. My father didn’t really care about the news, he said nothing would ever change, just one wall won’t make a difference. But the next day our neighbour said, ‘What are you doing, you are missing the biggest event of your life.’ So we drove there, not very far, and then there were so many people we couldn’t move, so we got out and walked. There was a big smash in the concrete, nothing like we’ve ever seen, all the way through the two walls, outer and in. We went through and the people on the other side were like us, but not so, how do you call, grey? A woman put her hand on my cheek and gave me sweets.”
“And then you were in the West.”
“For a few hours, yes, then we went back. I had to do my homework and my mother wanted to cook dinner. We went across again on the weekend; there were fewer people then and more of the wall was missing. It was more normal to walk across, and no one welcomed us like before. I asked my mother where the people with the sweets were. She laughed and said life in the West would not always be so much fun. A few weeks later we moved to Sweden.”
“Why Sweden?”
“Why not? It was the West. She hadn’t seen anything of the West. Maybe she remembered her sister, trying to swim across to Sweden. Not so far, but far enough.”
There is a silence, and then Peter says, gently, “She came to Sweden so she could meet me.” It sounds almost like a joke, but there is a stillness in his voice that was not there before. He lowers himself onto his elbows so Sigrid can fit her body against his, sliding together as if their curves and grooves were made to match.
“And now,” says Sigrid, “I am Swedish.”
“But you came back.”
“I wanted to see.”
“You have walls in your country too? Great Wall,” says Peter.
“Singapore isn’t part of China,” says Joy, without rancour. “And the Great Wall was to keep people out, not in.”
“Most walls do both,” says Sigrid.
They talk about nothing much, what will happen next. The Swedes have no plan, they will hitchhike off Rügen, and see where they end up next, or maybe they will take a ferry to Norway. They have a bit of money saved up, and travel is cheap when it is summer and you will spend most of your nights sleeping in the open.
And behind them, still visible in the moonlight, is the great concrete slab of Prora. Really, they are between two walls, that and the screen of trees shielding them from the full force of the sea winds. Joy is looking forward to seeing what remains of the Berlin wall—“Mauer”, she remembers, not “Wand” like an interior wall. The few stretches they have allowed to stay, and the line that marks the rest. There are fewer walls where she comes from, but she remembers, as a child, asking her parents about the one around their condominium. So the bad people can’t see what we have, she was told. Or they might come and rob us.
This feels like the end of the night, the wind softening its tone, now like a lullaby, like the last slow song before the nightclub turns its lights on. How unlikely that she should be here, thousands of miles from the place she was born. No walls for her. She carefully brushes sand off her blouse and thinks, I should get back, but stays for just a moment longer, enjoying the sounds and sap-smells of the night.
Peter and Sigrid are quiet now, but there isn’t enough light to tell if they are asleep. She doesn’t want to speak, it would spoil something, whatever is circling in the air around them. Joy collects long German words; she enjoys how they are concertinaed together from shorter ones, how there is always one for the specific sensation of each moment. Right now, it would be Waldeinsamkeit,
the feeling of being alone in the woods. Not necessarily a literal forest, though there are enough trees within easy reach. As she shuts her eyes, she lists compound words. Schadenfreude, of course. Verschlimmbesserung, a so-called improvement that actually makes things worse. Schwellenangst, the fear of crossing thresholds, or boundaries.
Joy dreams of being in a maze, of running through a limitless number of turnings and crossroads, all of which might lead to more choices, or to a dead end. And on either side of her are walls too high and smooth to climb, so tall she can only dimly see the sky above her, and a glimmer of the moon. It feels like just the other side of the walls are all the people she has lost, not visible but still present. Those who died, those who drifted away. The missing teacher is there too, the one who taught at her school and then just disappeared last March holidays. Where did she go? There is no one in sight, just her, just the path ahead. Kraft durch Freude, she tells herself. Strength through Joy.
She wakes up with a niggle of disquiet in her mind, a persistent crick in her neck, but most of all a warmth and well-being that radiates through every cell in her body. The sun is already up, an intense point low in the swimming-pool sky, bright in a different way to Singapore, more scorching than roasting. It’s going to be a hot day. A moment of panic as she looks at her watch, but it is not yet seven; she has plenty of time to walk back, shower, and present herself at breakfast as if none of this has happened. She won’t tell anyone, not even her husband—not for any reason, he wouldn’t mind, and not to erase it either, but just because.
The Swedes are still asleep beside her, their skin even paler against the tangle of red hair by daylight. She looks at them a moment, decides against taking a picture, and waves goodbye although they cannot see her. She should go. If any of the students are awake already—well, she’ll have to pretend she was out on a morning stroll.