The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Afternoon, sir,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Do I need to register with you before crossing over?”

  “No need, sir. And if you have any problems on the other side, well, we do have an embassy there. But you’re just going over for the day, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, unless you’re planning to meet with dissidents or give away Bibles on a street corner.”

  “Not my thing.”

  “You should have no problems then. And as you will have to be back over here by midnight . . .”

  “You ever been over there yourself?”

  “That’s forbidden for those of us who wear this uniform, sir. You have a good day now in East Berlin.”

  I moved on toward the checkpoint itself and found myself approaching a huge gate. It stretched the entire width of the street, both sides of it dead-ending into The Wall. Barbed wire shaded all open areas. There were two members of the Volkspolizist stationed immediately on the far side of the gate. As I approached, they nodded to me and swung open this portal.

  “Passport,” one of them asked in German.

  I showed them my American passport.

  “You go there,” the Volkspolizist said, pointing to a booth up ahead, speaking now in fractured in English.

  “Ich danke ihnen,” I replied and walked forward, hearing the gate close behind me with a dull clang. Up ahead was a prefabricated booth. There were several heavily armed officers standing by it. Behind the Plexiglas was another uniformed Volkspolizist. He took my passport and asked if I spoke German. When I replied in German, he nodded and informed me that I would be receiving a one-day visa that would expire at midnight tonight.

  “You must leave the German Democratic Republic before midnight and you must also leave by this border station. You cannot leave by another border. And you must now change thirty westmarks for thirty GDR marks.”

  I knew that this exchange rate was absurdly inflated, that a GDR mark was worth nothing more than twenty Pfennig in Western money, thereby making it a 5:1 rate. But I had read in several guidebooks and articles about crossing over into East Berlin that this was a way in which the GDR regime could gain hard currency. It was one of the many nonnegotiable components of a GDR visa, the other being the “you must be out by midnight” clause. Trying to actually travel in the country for any greater length of time was profoundly difficult, as the government preferred if you came on an official tour or part of a group with the correct left-leaning credentials. A writer like me would have no chance of getting a visa for independent travel, so an official in the East German embassy in Washington told me in an exchange of letters prior to my arrival, when I was thinking that I might be able to have an entire section on my adventures in the other Germany. The counsel made it very clear that I would only be given an extended visa if I was invited officially by the GDR Writers Union. But as my one book to date (he’d evidently gone to the trouble to find out what I had written) didn’t display the sort of socialist credentials that would win me favor with the people at the GDR Writers Union, I would be wasting my time pursuing this avenue of inquiry.

  Now, as the Volkspolizist official relieved me of my thirty westmarks (noting how he didn’t call this hard currency deutsche marks) and opened a large book, turned to the section marked “N,” and spent several minutes seeing if my name and passport number were registered therein, the thought struck me that, perhaps, the GDR counsel in Washington had dispatched my details to East Berlin, informing the authorities that I was a snoopy author, and therefore would be visiting the GDR to defame it.

  But the officer evidently found no such black mark against me, as he closed the Book of Non-Desirables and inked his entry stamp. As it landed on a fresh page of my passport I found myself considering, yet again, the dread that all officialdom raised in me. Then he pushed the document back to me and, with a curt nod, informed me that we were finished.

  Now one of the armed officers by the booth tapped me on the shoulder and pointed me toward a simple barricade, of the sort seen in parking lots. There was another handful of armed Volkspolizisten standing by this lone divider, beyond which stretched a city thoroughfare: Friedrichstrasse. As I marched toward this final hurdle prior to my entry into East Berlin the relative low-level security of this barricade on the eastern side of the frontier made it very clear that the authorities knew that any citizen committing the crime of “trying to flee the Republic” would be mad to try it at this, the most notorious border post in the city.

  A final check of my passport. Another reminder by this new officer perusing my travel document that I needed to be crossing this checkpoint, “and this checkpoint alone,” by midnight. Then, with a nod between these officials, the bar was raised and I walked into the German Democratic Republic. As I did so I couldn’t help but wonder what test of fidelity to the state was needed for a Volkspolizist to work here; what emotional ransom was exercised on all the officers stationed at such a sensitive border; whether they were informed, in no uncertain terms, that their families would be severely penalized if they ever dared flee the Republic themselves; what unspoken complicity, or lack thereof, existed in this special cadre of officers assigned to this checkpoint. Most tellingly, what were the unspoken thoughts of these men as they watched Westerners freely coming and going across this most contentious of ideological divides? The captors were possibly even more imprisoned than their fellow citizens whom they were helping keep captive. Because every working day they found themselves just a few steps away from a world where travel wasn’t restricted and a large degree of individual liberty was allowed. Or were these men the ultimate true believers, indoctrinated to consider the West a heartless mercantile machine that imprisoned its citizenry in an endless cycle of consumerist want and misery?

  And then—in the midst of all this ideological tug-of-war, backed up by two major military-industrial complexes and the omnipresent shadow of mutually assured destruction—there was this thing called day-to-day life. As in: the stout, fifty-something man in a shapeless anorak crossing in front of me as I left the checkpoint. He was carrying a vinyl brown briefcase and a plastic bag with two bottles of beer. An imitation brown fur hat was on his head, He was heading toward the grim concrete block of apartments located on the street behind Friedrichstrasse. What, I wondered, was this man’s occupation? He’d evidently been working on a very early shift, as he was heading home with beer at 1:16 in the afternoon. Did he live alone in a tiny apartment? Was he regarded as a citizen of such unquestionable loyalty that he could be housed so near The Wall? Once he was home, would he kill the time watching television or reading or perhaps heading out to some sports center nearby? Did he have a hobby that helped pass the time? If there was a woman in his life, did they live together? Or perhaps they worked together in the bottling plant where they both did the four-a.m.-to-noon shift daily and, as she was married to a cop, they had to meet clandestinely at his apartment for a few stolen hours twice a week. And look over there at that hunched woman in a plain gray cloth coat, following right behind this guy. She had a drab paisley scarf covering her head, a cigarette between the fingers of her left hand, a bag with some sad-looking daffodils clutched in her free fingers. Was she the cop’s wife, keeping a discreet distance behind her lover as they headed back to his place for their hurried assignation?

  Or was I just having a moment’s imaginary improvisation on my first sight of street life in East Berlin?

  As he disappeared around a corner, followed by the woman with the head scarf, I found my attention diverted by a squat stone building to my immediate right. A sign above its doorway read: “Bulgarische Handelsbank.” The Bulgarian Trade Bank. The building—nineteenth-century, in need of patching up and a coat of paint—had two storefront windows. They were both streaked with dirt. Taped directly onto them from the inside were yellowing photographs of happy peasants in the field, cheerfully bringing in that season’s wheat crop. Over these circa 1957 socialist realist snapshots
were hand-painted slogans, the rough translations of which were: We Believe in the Five-Year Plan . . . Together We Can Build the Socialist Future! Snow began to fall, so I thought it best to keep walking. Friedrichstrasse was, historically, one of the main thoroughfares and shopping precincts in Berlin. But the street I looked up was shuttered, empty. An occasional Trabant car crept up the road. There were a few heavily bundled up citizens in drab coats walking with their heads down against the snow. There was a clothes shop that was noteworthy for the paucity of items on show, the elderliness and shapelessness of the fashion, and the fact that this emporium looked so much like one of those charity shops I occasionally saw on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The difference here was that it was the only shop of note on this street. In fact, all of Friedrichstrasse appeared to be a testament to civic neglect. Cities are, on one level, visual exercises in façades. It’s all architectural window dressing—and, as such, an immediate, if superficial, conduit into the spirit of the place. Paris exudes elegant gravitas. Manhattan informs you constantly of its altitudinous ambition. However, these are merely first-glance observations. Surface scratches. Urban shorthand. But just as all clichés are rooted in a basic, crude verity, so it is also true that initial visual impressions do tell you plenty about a newfound terrain. What so gripped me about Friedrichstrasse—especially as I turned left onto Unter den Linden—was the realization that this was a city in thrall to the communal aesthetic that stated: all optics must be drab, spiritless, devoid of color. A world of grainy black-and-white.

  Unter den Linden. The great processional boulevard of Berlin, leading to the Brandenburg Tor, the Reichstag, and the forested playing fields of the Tiergarten. As soon as I stepped out on its wide thoroughfare, I turned west. How did I know this geographic direction? Because The Wall brutally clipped the flow of the avenue, with the Brandenburg Gate appearing above it. The shell of the Reichstag—long since abandoned by the Bundesrepublik when it began its postwar reconstruction in the quiet functionary environs of Bonn—hovered on the far side as well. I stared long and hard at this prospect from the center of Unter den Linden. From here The Wall so dominated everything. On the side streets in my own corner of Kreuzberg, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Wall was simply a dead end, an interference, the world’s biggest No Trespassing sign. But that was a perspective informed by the fact that I was on the western side of the edifice. But here, in the East, on this most ceremonial of Berlin boulevards, The Wall took on the status of an obscenity. By placing it directly at the end of Unter den Linden, the East German authorities were informing its citizens and the rest of the world: We are barricading ourselves in here and we celebrate this. We are happy to flaunt the extremity of this measure. Happy to remind you that this is a closed place.

  I had always been suspicious of the sort of standard issue anti-Communist rhetoric spouted by Reagan and his cronies. Just as I also was unnerved by the “America: Love It or Leave It” doctrine of the so-called Moral Majority who accepted the flag-hugging claptrap enunciated by every ambitious conservative American blowhard from the appalling Joe McCarthy onward. But standing here, looking at that Wall . . . it’s not that I had an immediate Pauline conversion and would vote for Reagan’s reelection in November of this year. Perhaps the heart of the matter was to be found in my own fear of restrictions, of being closed into a life I didn’t want. That’s how The Wall impacted me, as a symbol of confinement and limitation. The Wall said to me: We will circumscribe you. We will demand allegiance to a doctrine, a set of social rules, that you have no choice but to obey. If you choose to play the dissident, if you dare act out the dream of simple mobility beyond the frontiers with which we have enveloped you, if you dare publish (or just utter) out loud thoughts that run counter to our doctrines, we will be merciless.

  Perhaps The Wall was just that: a tabula rasa on which your own fears and internal contradictions could be reflected. No doubt there were those in this world who had accepted the official creed that The Wall existed to shut out impure capitalist/imperialist influence. Perhaps they needed to believe this creed, as it allowed them to tolerate the limitations placed upon them. Perhaps there were those who rationalized it as simply the way the world was. Perhaps there were those who didn’t care about freedom of movement, freedom of expression. Perhaps there were those who were also convinced: we had no other alternative. Even though, to this outsider, this Westerner, such a viewpoint was the height of self-delusion. But don’t we frequently perceive our lives through a blurred lens that masks all the painful truths we prefer to dodge? Even when we tell ourselves that our point of view is the accurate one we are not acknowledging the fact that it is simply our own singular way of considering our lives and the world around us. Everything is subjective, including the way you choose to look at the Berlin Wall.

  I walked down Unter den Linden right to the edge of this blockade. There were no guards here, no sentry towers. I knew from some reading I had done that while climbing over the wall itself was not difficult (it stood only around fifteen feet high), the would-be escapee then encountered a no-man’s-land, laden with trip wires and patrolled by guard dogs. Hardly anybody ever made it through this death strip, as the surveillance was too formidable and the trip wires too densely planted. Then there was the well-known “shoot to kill” policy that all East German border guards followed when it came to firing on anyone who did not halt when ordered to. To continue running after being caught in noman’s-land was to invite death. Even though the standard jail sentence for the crime of “attempting to flee the Republic” was three years—and the subsequent loss of all employment or housing status in the GDR (in short, an even more circumscribed and bleak life)—the vast majority of attempted defectors now tended to bow to the inevitable when caught. The number of attempted escapes had plummeted massively in recent years, as the authorities had become so ruthlessly thorough when it came to closing off all possible avenues of egress. How strange to approach this edifice with the understanding that you were closed in by it, that the idea of, say, picking up and moving to Paris for a year to write that epic verse novel you always promised yourself you’d tackle was simply beyond the realm of possibility. How strange to have a barrier placed around your state as a means of reinforcing your immobility.

  But I had grown up with the absurd idea that the world was my playground; that, as long as I didn’t entrap myself, I was free to explore it as much as I wanted. That was the curious thing about life in the West. So many of us with the right educational and socioeconomic opportunities chose to close ourselves off into lives we didn’t want, complaining how we had become enslaved by mortgages, car payments, children. Whereas over here . . . well, entrapment had a rather different meaning in East Berlin.

  I turned an about-face and spent the next few hours exploring the thoroughfare that ran from Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. Just beyond the Komische Oper I wandered around a large, sparsely stacked Buchhandlung named the Karl Marx. It largely seemed filled with yellowing political texts and GDR editions of East German writers like Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf. But there was a small section of foreign literature in German translation—again, all official East German editions, and works that had evidently passed the stringent censorship hurdles set here because they held up a critical mirror to the bourgeois, capitalist systems in which they were written: all of Dickens, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

  There was a rather fetching young woman seated at the main information desk of the bookshop. She looked about my age, mid-twenties, with long black hair that had been carefully braided and piled up on top of her head in an immense bun. She was slender, wearing a simple black turtleneck, a somewhat short brown corduroy skirt, black tights. Despite her lithe frame, I immediately noticed the fullness of her breasts, the pleasing curvature of her hips, the absolute clarity of her flawle
ss skin, the small granny glasses perched on the edge of her nose that gave her an air of attractive bookishness, the seriousness so apparent in her eyes. She reached for a packet of what I presumed to be local cigarettes. They were called f6—the packet looking like a throwback to the Second World War. As she fished one out, I could see they were filterless and loosely made.

  “Would you like to try a Marlboro?” I heard myself asking.

  She looked up at me, surprised by the question, surprised by my German. I could see her taking me in immediately. Before crossing I had stopped by the little corner store near the Café Istanbul and bought three packs of Marlboro, thinking they might come in handy on “the other side.” I could see her taking me in, noting the leather jacket I was wearing, the heavily soled English black boots, the thick scarf around my neck, and immediately sizing me up as an Ausläunder: a foreigner. Then I saw her eyes darting around the store, seeing if there was anybody there. There wasn’t, so she nodded and whispered, “Why are you offering me a cigarette?”

  “Because I want to offer you a cigarette.”

  I came over and proffered the pack. Again a nervous glance around the shelves and even outside to see if anyone was peering in through the window. Again the coast was clear. She reached over and pulled a cigarette from the pack, then took a box of matches and touched the flame to her Marlboro and the one I had placed between my lips. She took in a deep long lungful of smoke, the smallest of smiles forming on her lips. Then she exhaled, asking me:

  “So let me guess: you figured the way to chat up a woman in East Berlin was by playing the GI in 1945 and showing up with some American cigarettes. So before coming over this morning . . .”

  “How do you know when I arrived?”

  “Because you all arrive over here in the morning, and are all gone by the witching hour. That’s how the system works. Unless, of course, you are here on official business, in which case you would not be here, trying to get me to spread my legs out of gratitude for letting me smoke one of your so American cigarettes.”