by Marc Levy
Mathias was always singing, and it got on Antoine’s nerves. Julia spent her time trying to make out the lyrics, which she couldn’t always understand. At least it helped her stay awake.
The memories brought a smile to Julia’s face . . . and more kept coming back to her. They had stopped at a rest area along the highway. We counted our money and decided to buy some baguettes and ham. One of them purchased a bottle of Coke in honor of Julia’s roots. In the end, she drank only a sip.
Her traveling companions spoke French too quickly, using many expressions that were completely indecipherable to her ears. She had mistakenly assumed that the six years of French classes would make her bilingual. Why did Daddy insist I learn French in the first place? Was it in honor of his days in Montreal?
They took the wrong exit outside of Mons, at La Louvière, and had to endure a harrowing drive through Brussels. They stopped to ask a local for directions to Liège. Julia couldn’t understand a word, due to the man’s thick Belgian accent, which kept Mathias laughing for a good while. Antoine recalculated their travel time. The detour had cost them an hour. Mathias begged Julia to drive faster. The revolution wasn’t going to wait for them! They checked the map and turned around, deciding that the northernmost route would take too long. They decided to go toward Liège, then through Düsseldorf.
First, they crossed through Flemish-speaking Belgium. As the French signs thinned out and disappeared, Julia marveled at the three different languages spoken just a few miles apart. “A quaint country full of waffles and lace,” concluded Mathias dismissively, urging her to pick up the pace. Just before Liège, Julia’s eyelids grew heavy with fatigue and the car swerved, jarring her two passengers.
They stopped to gather their wits on the shoulder of the highway. Antoine gave her a lecture, and she was banished to the backseat.
Julia didn’t mind her punishment all that much. She fell asleep out before the border crossing and didn’t remember a second of it. Mathias’s diplomatic passport—attained through his ambassador father—persuaded the West German border guards to let his “stepsister” sleep. After all, she was exhausted from the overnight flight into Europe from the States.
The officer had been understanding and waved them onward after a cursory glance at the three passports stowed in the glove compartment.
The two boys decided to make a pit stop without consulting Julia. It was clear that everyone could use a proper breakfast at a real café. And so, on the morning of November 8, just as they were driving into Dortmund, Julia had awoken to find herself in Germany for the first time in her life. Little did she know that her world would be turned upside down the very next day.
Julia took the wheel once more just past Bielefeld, near Hanover. Antoine protested, but it was clear the two guys were in no shape to drive, and Berlin was still a great distance away. Both French passengers crashed straight away, leaving Julia to enjoy a few moments of silence. As the car approached Helmstedt, the journey took on a more ominous tone. In the distance, barbed-wire fences marked the border of East Germany. Mathias awoke and told Julia to pull over onto the shoulder right away.
They plotted a strategy, deciding what roles they would play when crossing the border. Mathias would take the wheel, Antoine would ride shotgun, and Julia would stay in the back. All of their hopes rested on Mathias’s precious diplomatic passport. Mathias insisted they rehearse their lines. Any mention of their real objective had to be carefully avoided. When they were asked why they wanted to enter the East, Mathias would say he was visiting his father, who was a diplomat in Berlin. Julia would play up the fact that she was American and also claim to have a diplomat father currently in the city. “What about me?” Antoine asked. “Just try and keep your mouth shut,” replied Mathias, turning the key in the ignition.
A dense fir tree forest stretched up to the edge of the highway. In a clearing ahead stood the leviathan forms of the checkpoint compound. The buildings were more on the scale of a train station than a border crossing. Their car wove between two semitrucks. A guard motioned for them to change lanes, and Julia could see Mathias’s optimism evaporate.
Two enormous pylons studded with searchlights towered above the treetops of the vast forest. Four watchtowers, nearly as high as the searchlights, stood across from them. A sign marked “Marienborn Border Checkpoint” loomed over the metal gates that opened and shut behind each vehicle.
At the first inspection point, they were told to open the trunk. As the officers rifled through Antoine’s and Mathias’s bags, Julia realized she hadn’t brought a single thing of her own. They were told to move their car ahead. A little farther on they drove through a corridor flanked by white corrugated-metal buildings, where their passports would be inspected. An officer ordered Mathias to stand apart from the others. Antoine began to grumble that the whole trip was utterly insane, just as he had insisted from the beginning. Mathias reminded him about the promise he had made to be silent during the border crossing. Julia threw anxious glances at Mathias, completely lost as to what she was supposed to do next. The guard asked Mathias to follow him.
Mathias took our passports and followed the customs officer. I remember it like it was yesterday. Antoine and I waited. Even though we were all alone in that gloomy tin shed, we followed his orders—we didn’t utter a word about what we were really doing. Mathias returned with a soldier behind him. We had no way of knowing what would happen next. The young soldier looked us over one at a time. He gave the passports back to Mathias and gestured for us to continue down the road. I had never been so terrified in my entire life. I’d never before experienced that heart-stopping sensation, having my personal space and freedom violated so completely, like something slipping under my skin and chilling me to the bone. Our car slowly rolled toward the next checkpoint, where we came to a stop under the roof of an enormous building. Mathias was taken aside, and we found ourselves alone once more. When he finally came back, his smile told us we had made it. We were free to continue on into Berlin. We were told to stay on the highway until we reached our final destination.
A cool breeze blew across the promenade from the Old Port of Montreal, sending a chill down Julia’s spine. Her eyes remained glued to the face on the charcoal drawing. The paper it was drawn on seemed far whiter than the corrugated buildings that had once stood on the border, cutting Germany in two.
I was making my way toward you, Thomas. Neither of us had any idea of what was to come. And you . . . you were still alive.
It took at least another hour before Mathias started to sing again. Aside from a few trucks, the only cars they encountered were little East German Trabants. It was as though all East Germans owned identical cars to avoid competition with neighbors. In comparison, the students’ Peugeot 504 made quite an impression. The other drivers gawked in wonder as the car continued on its way.
They drove past Magdeburg, Schermen, Theessen, Köpernitz, and finally Potsdam, just twenty miles outside Berlin. When they entered the Berlin suburbs, Antoine insisted that he take the wheel. Julia burst out laughing, reminding him that it was her compatriots who had liberated the city forty-five years earlier, and not his.
“And they’re still there,” Antoine replied with a bitter undertone.
“Alongside the French” was Julia’s icy response.
“Give it a rest. The two of you are wearing me out,” Mathias chimed in.
They fell silent once again until they reached the gates of the Western enclave in the middle of East Germany. Nobody spoke until they had crossed into the city. Then Mathias triumphantly cried, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”
10.
They arrived in Berlin much later than planned. The afternoon of November 8 was already drawing to a close, but they ignored the time they had lost and denied the exhaustion wearing away at them. The electricity in the air was palpable; they could feel that something enormous was happening, just as Antoine had predicted. Four days earlier, a million East Germans gathered in protest out in the street
s. The wall loomed over everything, with thousands of soldiers and guard dogs patrolling it day and night. For twenty-eight years, families, friends, and neighbors had been separated from one another by twenty-eight miles of concrete, barbed wire, and watchtowers. The sudden and brutal growth of these horrific structures came to symbolize the Cold War during that dismal summer. People who had once lived side by side were helpless to do anything but wait, desperately longing to be reunited, without ever daring to hope that day would come.
Seated at a bar, the three friends eavesdropped on the conversations taking place around them. Antoine did his best to translate for Mathias and Julia, putting the whole of his high school German to use. People were saying that the communist regime could not possibly hold out much longer. Some even thought it was just a matter of time before the borders would be opened.
Everything had changed since Gorbachev’s visit to East Germany in October. A journalist from the Der Tagesspiegel, who had stopped in to grab a quick beer, described how his newspaper was buzzing with activity. He even confessed that headlines that normally would have already gone to print were currently locked on hold. Something important was about to happen, but he could not say more.
At nightfall, their long journey finally caught up with them. Julia couldn’t stop yawning and got a case of the hiccups. Mathias tried everything he could to stop them. First, he tried scaring her, but each attempt just made her burst out laughing, intensifying the jolting hiccups that shook her body each time. Antoine got involved. They contorted their bodies and did gymnastics. They made her drink a glass of water while being held upside down with her arms outspread. The cure was supposedly foolproof, yet her hiccups returned immediately, with a vengeance. A few regulars at the bar proposed other solutions. Downing a pint in one gulp might work. She could try holding her breath as long as possible. Another person suggested she lie on the ground and bring her knees to her chest. Everyone had an idea. Finally, a friendly doctor having a beer at the bar told Julia in nearly flawless English that she simply needed to get some rest. The dark circles under her eyes gave away her exhaustion—sleep would be the best medicine. The three friends decided to search for a youth hostel.
Antoine tried to ask the bartender where they could find a place to stay, but he was exhausted as well, and the man couldn’t understand a single word he said. They finally found two rooms in a little hotel close by. The boys could share one, and Julia would have the other to herself. They crawled up the stairs to the fourth floor and collapsed into bed. Mathias fell asleep instantly, sprawled across the entire bed before Antoine could protest, so he ended up spending the night on a down comforter on the floor.
The portrait artist was having trouble finishing her sketch. She had already asked Anthony three times to hold still, but he took no notice of her. Each time she tried to capture his likeness, he twisted his head around for a look at his daughter. Julia was still staring at the sample portraits. Her expression was absent; her mind seemed to be elsewhere. Not once had she taken her eyes from the board since Anthony sat down.
It was almost noon on November 9 when the three travelers reunited in the lobby of the little hotel. They took that afternoon to explore the city of Berlin. A few hours, Thomas . . . I’ll meet you for the first time in just a few short hours.
Their first stop was the Siegessäule Victory Column. Mathias found it far more striking than the one that stood at Place Vendôme in Paris. Antoine insisted that comparing the two was thoroughly pointless. Julia asked if they always bickered like this. The two were astonished at the question—for them, it was just a normal conversation, and they didn’t understand what she meant. They walked on through the Kurfürstendamm shopping district. They wandered down hundreds of streets, slumping against each other on streetcars, until Julia insisted she couldn’t take another step. In the middle of the afternoon, the three stopped to collect their thoughts in front of the memorial church that the locals referred to as Der hohle Zahn, or “the hollow tooth.” After bombs had destroyed most of the building during World War II, the wrecked tower had been preserved as a memorial. What remained of the church did indeed bear a strong resemblance to a jagged incisor.
At 6:30 p.m., Julia and her friends found themselves at the edge of a park, which they decided to cross on foot.
A short while later, a spokesman for the East German government made a declaration that would change the course of history, or at least the end of the twentieth century. East Germans would be allowed to come and go as they pleased. They would be free to cross into the West without being fired upon by soldiers or torn to pieces by attack dogs. Hundreds of men, women, and children had died trying to get to the other side during those bleak Cold War years, only to be cut down by the bullets from zealous guardians atop the wall of shame, and now the East Berliners were suddenly free to go. A journalist asked the spokesman when the decision would go into effect. The bureaucrat must have misunderstood the question, and simply responded: “Immediately!”
The news received wall-to-wall coverage across all radio and television stations, echoing incessantly throughout the East and the West.
Thousands of West Germans gathered at the checkpoints. Thousands of East Germans did the same. Two French students and an American girl were swept along with them, riding the wave as the mass of humanity made a mad dash for freedom.
At 10:30 p.m., the border crossings on both sides were flooded with thousands of citizens hungry for freedom. The soldiers guarding the checkpoints found themselves at the foot of the wall. The barriers at Bornheimer Strasse came down, and Germany took one giant step closer to reunification.
You ran through the city, making your way through the streets, rushing toward freedom, and I walked toward you without knowing or understanding the force that pushed me onward. The victory of the wall coming down was not my own, and Germany not my country. The streets of Berlin were entirely foreign to me.
I also started running, trying desperately to escape the crush of the mob. Antoine and Mathias tried to shield me. We ran along the interminable concrete wall that hopeful artists had covered with layer upon layer of paint. Some of your compatriots couldn’t bear to wait at the checkpoints and began to climb over the top. We watched from this side of the world. It was as if you and I were already together even though we were still separate. We watched and waited, holding our breath. All around me people stood with open arms, hoping to cushion falls or to hoist one another up on shoulders for a view of the people running toward them, prisoners of the Iron Curtain who would be free, in only a few short moments. Our voices rang out and joined together, a cry of encouragement, a cry to chase away the fear, a cry to let you know we were waiting on the other side. All at once, I changed. The American girl who had fled New York, the child of a country that had been at war against yours—I was suddenly swept up in the tide of emotion. At that moment, I was German, too. In the innocence of my adolescence I also dared to whisper, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and I wept. I wept like a child, Thomas . . .
That evening, lost in the middle of a very different crowd of people, among the wandering tourists on a Montreal wharf, Julia cried once more. The tears flowed freely down her cheeks as she stared at the charcoal-sketched portrait.
Anthony Walsh’s eyes were fixed on Julia. He called out to her again.
“Julia? Are you all right?”
His daughter was too far away to hear. Twenty years too far away.
The crowd became increasingly agitated. People started to chip away at the wall with whatever tools they could get their hands on—screwdrivers, rocks, pocketknives—all pathetic in the face of concrete, but the wall was an obstacle that was destined to crumble. Just twenty feet away, something incredible had started to happen. A world-renowned cellist, who had also come from Paris, heard about the events and came to join us, to join you. He sat down and began to play. Was that really the same evening, or a day or two after? It doesn’t matter. His music helped pull down the wall as much as the strike
s against the concrete. Melodies of freedom floated through the air and over the wall toward you. I wasn’t the only one crying, you know. I saw many tears that night. Those of a mother and daughter holding each other tightly, overwhelmed to be reunited after twenty-eight years of separation. I saw graying fathers recognize their sons among thousands of others. I saw so many Berliners for whom tears were the only release after all the suffering they had endured. And suddenly, in the middle of it all, I saw you. On top of the wall, the dust on your face serving only to intensify your beautiful eyes. You were the first man I had ever seen from the East, and I was the first girl you had ever seen from the West.
You stayed crouched atop the wall for a long time. A new world spread itself before you, and you stared at me as though we were connected by an invisible thread. I cried like a fool, and you smiled down at me. You swung your leg over the wall and jumped. I did what others had done and opened my arms to you. You fell on top of me, and we rolled across the ground—hallowed ground upon which your footsteps had never trod. You apologized in German, and I said hello in English. You stood up and dusted off my shoulders as though you had done it a hundred times before. You continued speaking, but I couldn’t understand a word. From time to time you nodded. I laughed at how ridiculous we were. You extended your hand, and you spoke the name that I would come to repeat so many times, a name that I haven’t said in such a very long time.
Thomas.
On the docks, a passing woman bumped into Julia without stopping to apologize. Julia didn’t even notice. A black-market street vendor hawking jewelry waved a string of wooden beads in her face. She slowly shook her head, deaf to his sales pitch. Anthony got up and gave the portrait artist ten dollars. She gave him the sketch. She had captured his expression to a tee; the resemblance was striking. Satisfied with the final product, he pulled another ten dollars out of his pocket, a generous doubling of her fee. He went to Julia’s side.