The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Who says there’s any sort of ulterior motive here?”

  “You’re a man. There is always an ulterior motive. And you’re an American—so you are an exploitative instrument of Western imperialism as well.”

  She said this last part of the sentence with such delicious irony that I found myself even more smitten. She noted this, saying:

  “Ah, look at the shock on your face at talking with a Communist with a sense of humor.”

  “You’re a Communist?”

  “I live here. So I am what the system tells me to be. Because that’s how I end up in a good bookshop like this one, in the capital, with a nice little apartment in Mitte which, I’m certain, you’d like to see.”

  “Is that an offer?”

  “No, just a further commentary on the ‘ulterior motives’ . . . isn’t that what you called them? . . . going on in that American mind of yours.”

  “How can you be sure I’m American?”

  “Oh please. But your German is rather good, which is a surprise.”

  “My name is Thomas.”

  “And my name is of no consequence here because my boss, Herr Kreplin, will be returning from his lunch in less than fifteen minutes. If he sees me talking to you . . .”

  “I understand. Any chance I could see you later?”

  “Where shall we meet? In a café in my quarter where everyone will notice that I am seated with an American? Or perhaps at my apartment? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, actually I would.”

  My directness gave her pause for thought. Again a fast glance through the plate glass window into the street beyond.

  “Perhaps I might like that, too, even though I doubt my boyfriend would approve. Not that he is that worthy of fidelity. But the problem with anything happening beyond this casual conversation in this bookshop is: when word got back to the ‘authorities’ that I was seen with a foreigner, an American, in a bar or had the audacity to invite him back to my apartment . . . and, trust me, someone would see us, someone would inform . . . well, good-bye to my nice job in one of the best bookshops in Berlin. And all because I was seduced by a Marlboro.”

  Another deep drag on her cigarette.

  “But it is a very good cigarette.”

  “Keep the pack,” I said, putting it into her hand. As I did so she covered my hand with her free one and said:

  “You must go. Go right now. Because if Herr Kreplin spies me here with you . . .”

  “No problem. But please tell me your name.”

  “Angela.”

  “Nice meeting you, Angela.”

  “Nice meeting you, Thomas. And I won’t say ‘See you around.’”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “No,” she said, her voice suddenly hard. “That is reality. And now, Auf Wiedersehen.”

  I wished her good-bye and left. As I looked back, I saw Angela quickly secreting the Marlboros in her bag, her face radiating anxiety. A man in his fifties, carrying a vinyl attaché case and wearing a gray vinyl jacket, came walking toward me. He had thick Coke-bottle glasses. He looked me over with clear distrust. Once he had passed me, I turned around and saw that he had headed into the Karl Marx Buchhandlung. Was that Herr Kreplin? If so, Angela was right to shoo me away so quickly. He looked like such a functionary, such an informer.

  And how the hell could you surmise that from a once-over glance on the street? Because Angela indicated that he wasn’t someone who would look kindly on her conversation with an American. And therefore . . .

  We all make instant summations like this, don’t we? Especially when there is the edgy realpolitik of the East-West divide heightening the tension. And yes, I did feel an exhilarating tension while walking the streets of East Berlin. The tension of being in a largely forbidden place, where the undercurrent police state paranoia was already tangible. East Berlin: the bogeyman of all Cold War nightmares.

  I pushed north, past the once-ornate, Hapsburgian-style collection of buildings that housed Humboldt University. I approached the front portals, thinking it might be interesting to wander inside, see if I could fall into conversation with some students, get an atmospheric whiff of life in an Eastern Bloc university, maybe even talk my way into a few beers at a local Stube with whomever I met. But as I got closer to the entranceway, I saw a uniformed guard checking the ID cards of everyone entering the premises. He glanced in my direction. From the look on his face he made it very clear that he’d immediately clocked me as a Westerner and was wondering why I was walking toward the entrance to this East German university. I smiled at him in a manner that hopefully hinted I saw myself as a thoroughly ditzy tourist who had wandered into the wrong place. With a quick about-face I headed back toward Unter den Linden.

  I was in an area that had evidently not been flattened by the Allied bombing raids that had leveled Berlin. The western sector of the city, on the other hand, had been devastated beyond any sort of repair. The few historic buildings that remained in the West—the graceful apartment blocks around Savignyplatz, the occasional fin de siècle hotel—were somewhat akin to the two passengers of a jumbo jet who walked away alive when the rest of the flight went down. The ravaging was so thorough, so scorched earth, that little remained. Perhaps that was one of the stranger ironies about the postwar division of the city. The Western powers were handed the most leveled of landscapes and, in conjunction with the emerging new Bundesrepublik, reconstructed a city in a mishmash of modernist styles that radiated a certain raffish energy. Though the eastern sector also suffered dreadful bombardment, many of its quarters remained semi-intact, while the great ceremonial buildings leading up to Alexanderplatz also managed to largely survive. The problem was, the East couldn’t afford the funds needed to restore them back to their original splendor—and the prevailing Communist aesthetic was brutal and based in reinforced concrete.

  So after the decayed splendor of Humboldt University and the Staatsoper and the extraordinary sight of the Berliner Dom—that vast variation on the St. Paul’s school of ecclesiastical architecture, its charred black dome reflecting certain historic realities—the German Democratic Republic had constructed perhaps the ugliest public works building I had yet to encounter. A squat concrete box stretching over several acres, angular and blunt in its lines, ashen gray breezeblock in color, and finished in a pebble-dash style. It was a profoundly Stalinist civic monument—the most striking statement yet of the way the hierarchy of this state saw the world. For this was Der Palast der Republik: their parliament and the administrative nerve center of the Socialist Workers Party that always won every rigged legislative election with 90 percent of the vote. Aesthetically, the People’s Palace reflected the visual barbarity that was The Wall. It informed all onlookers: In this People’s Republic there is no belief in the redemptive power of beauty. There is just this stark vision of life as harsh, callous, unkind.

  Further up Unter den Linden the boulevard intersected with one of the great geographic locations in twentieth-century German literature, Alexanderplatz. For here Alfred Doblin set his famous 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. It not only painted a panoramic portrait of low life in this, the actual physical center of Berlin. It remains one of the great novels to have emerged during the Weimar Republic: that German golden age between the two world wars when the country underwent nothing short of a creative revolution and reasserted itself as the great artistic innovator of its time. So much that emerged from the Weimar Republic—from the Brecht and Weill collaborations, to Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus School of Architectural Modernism, to Thomas Mann’s dense bildungsromans, to the visionary early films of Fritz Lang—let it be known that Germany (and, specifically, its capital city, Berlin) was so cutting edge, so out there when it came to redefining the global artistic landscape. The arrival of Nazism at the end of the 1920s was the jackboot forcibly crushing this brief, short interregnum of wild creative freedom and easy mores.

  And I knew from photographs that Alexanderplatz had been largel
y leveled in the last war. Just as I also knew that the East Germans had chosen to build an iconic symbol—a looming television tower—right in the center of the bomb site. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the way they had also turned the entire area into a bleak high-rise ghetto. Concrete canyons. Bleak apartment blocks. Empty shopping precincts. No color. No vegetation. No sense of anything geared toward making this urban landscape livable, tolerable.

  I ducked into a café just opposite the Alexanderplatz tram stop. It was all linoleum and lit by fluorescent tubes. There was a lingering smell of grease and overcooked cabbage. I sat down at one of the tables. A lone woman—big hipped, an overplump face, her hair in curlers—was behind the counter.

  “Ja?” she asked tonelessly.

  “Coffee, please,” I said.

  As I waited for it to arrive, I took out my notebook and started jotting down all that had happened to me in the hours since crossing Checkpoint Charlie. I also fished out a Marlboro and lit it up.

  “Can I have one, too?” came a voice from a corner of the café.

  I looked over and saw a guy around my own age, sitting in a corner. His complexion was copper colored, he had close-cropped black hair, he was wearing a distressed brown leather jacket and the sort of jeans that had been so bleached they were a mishmash of blue denim and white rivulets. He had a packet of f6 cigarettes and a cup of coffee on the table in front of him.

  “Help yourself,” I said, tossing the pack of cigarettes over to him.

  He caught the pack and fished one out, immediately lighting it up.

  “We can buy Marlboro back in Luanda,” he said, his German decent, if heavily accented (like my own).

  “You’re Angolan?” I asked.

  “That’s right. How did you know Luanda? You’ve been there?”

  “Not yet. But I like reading maps. So what are you doing here in East Berlin?”

  “Sitting in this café and bothering people, as always.”

  This was the voice of the woman behind the counter as she came toward me with my cup of coffee, adding:

  “I always tell him I don’t want his kind in here, but he keeps coming back.”

  “He’s not bothering me,” I said. “And explain what you mean when you say ‘his kind.’”

  The woman glared at me, shoving the coffee in front of me and causing some of it to spill over into the saucer.

  “Thirty pfennigs,” she said.

  “Cigarette?” I asked, proffering the pack of Marlboros. She instantly took one and stormed off into the kitchen behind the counter.

  “She hates me,” the guy said.

  “I’d say she hates everyone.”

  “You’ve got that one right,” he said. “Can I . . . ?”

  He motioned to the seat next to mine.

  “Of course.”

  I now made the mistake of sipping the coffee. It was the color of light brown urine. The taste was commensurate.

  “You’re American?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “You over on a day pass?”

  “Something like that.”

  “West Berlin must be cool.”

  “Haven’t you been over there?”

  “Not allowed.”

  “But surely, as you’re not East German . . .”

  “Part of the deal with my scholarship. They won’t let me leave the country, except to go home to Luanda. And as my course is three years long . . .”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Chemical engineering.”

  “Is the course good here?”

  “The professors know what they are talking about. The rest of the students . . . I have no friends, except two other Angolans. Before I came here, I was told the German Democratic Republic loves Africans from ‘fraternal socialist countries.’ The women will throw themselves at you. The truth: I show up here and everyone acts as if I don’t exist. I want to go back to Luanda—but my father tells me his standing in the Party back home will be undermined if I quit now. I want to get a visa for West Germany, but my two Angolan friends here told me we are watched all the time. Anyway, the East German border guards have instructions to turn us back if we ever try to approach a border crossing. That’s the thing about being a citizen of a ‘fraternal socialist country.’ You are as entrapped here as everybody else. At least, back home, I am among my own people. And the sun is in the sky most of the year. Here . . . it’s all dark.”

  He said this all in a low voice, the woman, who had re-emerged from the kitchen glaring at us from behind the counter, trying to see if she could discern what he was saying. Why he had chosen me to impart this information so suddenly and freely was evident. Like the person you meet sitting next to you on a plane who unloads onto you his darkest secret and you realize that (1) he has a burning need to articulate that which is gnawing at him constantly; and (2) he knows you are completely outside his realm of contact, let alone someone with a degree of influence or power over his life. Were he to get friendly with a German classmate at his university here and inform him what he truly felt about life in East Berlin he could find himself next talking with the Stasi and representatives of his embassy. But a complete stranger and one who he had established is an American over on a Cinderella visa? I was the ideal candidate, especially as I had a packet of Marlboros on the table in front of me.

  “Mind if I . . . ?” he asked, pointing to the pack.

  “Go ahead. Why don’t you keep them?”

  He looked genuinely surprised.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The woman behind the counter scowled some more.

  “She will tell someone about this. I live across the street. I usually come in here for coffee, even though the coffee is shit. But it’s the only place to have coffee around here. But I know she will now report me for speaking with a foreigner. Maybe, if I get lucky, they will deport me.”

  He stood up, scooping up the pack of cigarettes.

  “Thanks for the Marlboros.”

  And he was gone.

  Once he was outside the door, I returned to my notebook, letting the terrible coffee go cold, occasionally glancing at the woman behind the counter. She was sitting on a stool next to the fridge, smoking and staring blankly up at the yellowed and mold-ridden ceiling tiles. Her eyes were heavy, her expression one of blank exhaustion, a visual expression for which the Germans have a word: weltschmerz. World-weariness. How I wanted to know what was eating her. A bad marriage? No man in her life? A divorce, and a new boyfriend who drank too much and occasionally lashed out with his fists? Loneliness? The futility of this job, with no further horizons beyond this café, this city, this highly regulated society? A sense that, in the great time-space continuum, what did someone who worked in an Alexanderplatz café leave behind? (Then again, unless we were that once-in-a-generation shape shifter of the human landscape, what did any of us leave behind?) Or, perhaps, just perhaps, I was being far too absurdly existential here. Perhaps she was just having a bad day. So I asked her just that.

  “Bad day?”

  Though she clearly heard me she didn’t turn her gaze away from the ceiling tiles. And her reply was nothing more than a simple shrug. I gathered up my things and, with a simple Auf Wiedersehen, headed toward the door.

  “Could I have another cigarette?” the woman asked.

  I came over and put my spare pack of Marlboros in her hand.

  “Keep them,” I said.

  “Not necessary,” she said, handing them back to me. “Just one cigarette. That’s all.”

  I opened the pack. She pulled out a single Marlboro and acknowledged her thanks with a small nod. Then, placing it behind her ear, she stared up again at the overhead tiles. The interaction was finished. I had to hit the street.

  I spent much of the remaining afternoon walking around two districts: Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Proper neighborhoods with an interesting architectural stock. The Allied bombs had also spared much here. Though nearl
y four decades of civic indifference to their upkeep had left most of them in a blistered, shabby state, the apartment buildings and houses here were built on a nineteenth-century human scale. Unlike the faceless Stalinist blocks that so defined Alexanderplatz and environs, here there was a sense of ordinary life not subservient to the state. Yes, everything needed a paint job. Yes, the paucity of goods for sale in the few corner shops I passed was striking. But in Kollwitzplatz, in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, there was a small park and playground, in which mothers pushed children in swings and sat on benches, smoking and gossiping. It didn’t matter that their clothes matched the grayness of the cityscape, or that the playground equipment was, at best, austere. And it didn’t matter that there was a huge billboard on the side of a building, exhorting the people to embrace the Five-Year Plan and featuring a Socialist Realist portrait of the longtime head of state, Erich Honecker, a man whose thick black glasses and drab silver hair and plain dull countenance gave him the look of a merciless tax inspector.

  No, what mattered here were children running around and mothers talking among themselves. It reminded me that, whatever about the stark surface realities of East Berlin, the reassuringly humdrum still asserted itself here. There were meals to be prepared, beds to be made, children to be dropped off at school, buses and trams to be taken to work, jobs to do, the commute home, the dinner that night, the book or television or maybe even some external divertissement (a film, play, concert) to chew up the evening, and then bed—and perhaps the pleasures (or, for some, the torments) of sex, followed by whatever sound or broken sleep to which you were accustomed. The accumulation of days like these—with their rarely deviating routines—so constitutes, for the vast majority of us, the broad outlines of our sentient existence. The happy couple, the bad marriage, the profession that excites, the employment that stultifies, the intimacy that is transcendent, the intimacy that is pedestrian or nonexistent . . . all such pleasures and dilemmas, the entire spectrum of human experience, exist in all social landscapes, whether they are walled in or not.