My Name Was Five

by Heinz Kohler

  Just like the night at the Baltic when the straw house burned down in no time at all; and the bombs made a lot of thunderous noises, too, like the grenades in the pond, and the pottery smashing against the Wagners’ door.

  I looked at Helga and pressed her hand.

  “I must get out of here,” I said. “Now!”

  We sat on a marble bench outside, and her hand caressed my hair. I felt hot and dizzy. My pulse raced and I felt a dull pain in the center of my chest.

  “I’m so sorry to have ruined our date,” I said, but Helga told me not to give it a second thought. She herself had once been buried alive, in Brandenburg, she knew what was going on.

  We took a taxi to the emergency room. The electrocardiogram showed nothing wrong with my heart and, by then, my pulse was normal. But a doctor didn’t like the pain I felt. He gave me a shot of Novocain, with a giant needle, right into the center of my chest.

  “To calm you down,” he said.

  -----

  My parents said that the ER doctor had been an idiot and could have killed me with the Novocain shot. I thought so, too, and decided henceforth to stay away from hospital emergency rooms and, maybe, from doctors in general. Luckily, I was still alive and not all was lost. Helga was willing to come over for another date.

  By then it was June and time for the famous Industrial Fair, an annual event held underneath the broadcasting tower, a rather poor imitation of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. We took the elevator to the very top, watched the sunset create a spectacular display of pink altocumulus undulates clouds that looked like ripples on water, and had dinner at the tower restaurant way above the ground. I spent almost every pfennig I owned.

  Once it was dark, we toured the exhibits in the brightly lit halls. One of them, in the automotive section, was particularly memorable. It featured a white convertible, under glass. The seats were made from real leopard skins, and the inside trim of the car was made of genuine silver and gold.

  “Specially manufactured for his Majesty, the Emperor of Abyssinia,” a sign said.

  There were so many people milling about, I began to feel trapped in the crowd, but I didn’t tell Helga about that. Besides, she didn’t mind going outside. We enjoyed the fountains and flower beds, but we looked in vain for the moon and the stars. By then the sky looked pitch-black, but powerful searchlights had been turned on to mark the spot of the exhibit. The crisscross pattern in the sky made me think of all the other nights when I had seen the same sight.

  Just before the sky filled up with Christmas trees and blackness gave way to brilliant red, when people whispered a lot and prayed and cried.

  But those days were gone! I forced myself to study the election posters along the walls of the exhibition halls. One of them showed a road in perspective, just as we had drawn it in art class, with more distant objects getting ever smaller, leading to a single point in the far horizon. That’s where a Russian bear stood with big eyes and a hammer and sickle on his hat.

  “All the Roads of Marxism Lead to Moscow!” the poster said. “Therefore CDU”

  It must have been a way for the Christian Democratic Union to slam the Social Democrats who were always advocating a non-Soviet type of Marxism.

  Ironically, we came upon a booth that was filled with bears, but they weren’t Russian bears. These bears were holding little copies of the Berlin flag, which also features a bear, because Berlin was founded in a forest filled with bears and the very name of the city means “little bear.” Now it turned out that one could get a gun at the bear booth and shoot at a target for a fee. If one hit the bull’s eye, one won a bear. I gave it a try and, to my everlasting surprise, won a bear for Helga.

  Unfortunately, the shot I fired did something else. As the sound exploded in my ears, I felt myself transported to the day Captain Werther had made me throw the People’s Grenade. A wave of dizziness came over me and I had a hard time pretending otherwise. But I didn’t let anybody know, at least not until the next day when I went to see Dr. Haase, our new family doctor, and told her about my frequent bouts with dizziness. She said it must be my eyes and prescribed thick reading glasses to rest my eye muscles. In days to come, those glasses made me even dizzier. I threw them out.

  -----

  A month later, Helga came again and this time I took her to the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s most famous avenue, where we saw a film starring Gary Cooper, called High Noon. Then we went to the Maison de France, a West Berlin equivalent of the House of German-Soviet Friendship in which we had spent so much time back in Burg. I had been taking French conversation classes at the place, but this time I took Helga to buy her a gift. I had it all planned ahead of time and we just happened to run into the perfume counter by Balmain, where we tried out Vent Vert, a fragrance to die for. Helga liked it a lot, just as I had, and I put a few drops on the back of her neck. I died a thousand deaths all evening long!

  We went window shopping along the Kurfürstendamm, pressing our hips together as we walked under the neon lights. We looked at the displays in the shop windows and at the reflection of ourselves, embracing.

  “A lovely couple,” Helga said.

  “I love you,” I replied.

  We turned the corner, and something took my breath away. I knew what it was, too. I knew right away. There was a little park with benches, lanterns, rows of forget-me-nots and pansies. And there was that dizziness again, my legs felt wobbly, I felt like throwing up. I asked Helga to sit down with me.

  “I’m so sorry. Hold me for a second, just hold me,” I said.

  My vision blurred, my stomach ached, I couldn’t breathe. But I was not going to give in!

  “I remember this place,” I said. “One night, my aunt and I came out of the theater over there. There had been an air raid. And when we came out, the street was filled with firemen and SS and Hitler Youths, all of them busily hauling corpses to the middle of the street, stacking them up, two, three, and four layers at a time, right there where the pansies are.”

  “Many of them were charred beyond recognition,” I recalled, “some reduced to half their normal size like Egyptian mummies I had seen; others looked almost untouched, having been overcome, perhaps, by carbon monoxide in some closed cellar nearby, but rapidly stiffening even then and beckoning us for help with claw-like hands…. And around the corner, just next to the U-Bahn sign, a figure lay. I remember it now, all doubled up, in a pool of a liquid that was still feeding little bluish phosphorous flames. I saw a wedding ring glimmer on a charred hand.”

  Helga held me, and I cried. I hadn’t cried, it seemed, for many years….

  The next day, I went back to Dr. Haase.

  “I keep having these spells of dizziness and my heart races and I have stomach pains and sometimes I feel like throwing up,” I said.

  Dr. Haase was annoyed that I hadn’t been wearing the glasses she prescribed. Then she put a rubber tube down my throat and looked at my stomach with the fluoroscope. Then she rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “There is nothing wrong with you,” she said. "You’re a hypochondriac. Get over it!”

  -----

  On the next weekend, when her roommates went on a concert tour, I decided to see Helga in East Berlin. My mother was hysterical at the thought, having just read about the new 858-mile East German barricades along the West German border, complete with barbed-wire fences, automatic shooting devices, land mines, and watch towers. I told her that didn’t apply to Berlin; still, she pictured me being arrested by the People’s Police and having to spend the rest of my life in the salt mines. She had a point there; they were always sending “criminals” to the Kaiseroda-Merkers salt mine in Thuringia.

  “But what the hell,” I thought. “I don’t care. It’ll be worth it.”

  But that’s not what I said. I said I would be perfectly safe. I had, after all, West Berlin ID papers and nobody would know that I was a refugee from the DDR [German Democratic Republic]. My father said I shouldn’t take along any western money; they a
lways arrested westerners for currency violations and some of those arrested were getting 20 years in the slammer just because they had a pocketful of Westmarks. I promised I would take care of the problem and officially exchange a few Westmarks for an equal number of Eastmarks on the other side of the border. I knew that the East German exchange rate of 1:1 was a rip-off; one could get 10 Eastmarks for a single Westmark in the west.

  Having thus calmed down my parents, at least a little bit, I took the trolley to the east. It went all the way, but the crew changed at the border. As promised, I walked ten meters into the DDR and exchanged my money at the absurd rate. In the meantime, the western crew sanitized the trolley car of all the election posters inside. One of them read: “Stalin Demands: Down With Adenauer! Now Especially: Vote Christian Democratic!”

  The new driver was in a hurry. He kept stomping his feet on the bell whenever people or other traffic got in his way. I thought of boots stomping on marbles and of cemetery plants. My pulse went much too fast. I looked out the window and was amazed at the contrast to West Berlin. Although all the streets and sidewalks had been cleared, most of the old ruins were still there and, unlike in the west, it was a rare event to come across a new construction site. Nor were there newly planted trees or parks and flower beds at street corners. And although evening was upon us, there certainly were no neon lights! All in all, the place looked drab; even the new store signs were hard to read, already ruined by peeling paint.

  I kept looking at the street signs; so many of them had changed and, quite predictably, they reflected the arrival of the new Communist society. The Horst-Wessel-Platz had become Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the Wilhelm Strasse was Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse, and the Dorotheen Strasse had turned into the Clara-Zetkin-Strasse. The Wilhelm-Platz was now Ernst-Thälmann-Platz, the Lothringer Strasse was called Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse, and the Frankfurter Allee had turned into Stalin Allee. The grand old center of royal and imperial power, the Schloss Platz, was now Marx-Engels-Platz, and even the name of our high school in Burg was there: the Karl-Friedrich-Strasse had become Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse.

  Helga's place, in an old building that hadn’t been bombed, was brightly lit; I could see the outline of her long legs through her dress when she opened the apartment door. Wow!

  She sat in my lap and gave me a kiss for each one of the roses I had brought. Then she made me sit at the table and be patient. She served a delicious meal: dumplings, red cabbage, and veal; Hungarian wine and frozen plums from Bulgaria.

  “I’m sorry,” I said and pulled down the window shades. “I’m irrational, and I know it,” I said. She knew about my compulsion to turn off the lights or pull the shades and gave me a hug.

  The Chain Hounds stood in the street at night and fired their rifles into windows that showed the slightest sign of light. And planes swooped down from nowhere like storks, and their guns roared and broke the windows of the train, and the lieutenant never said a word, but Dieter did, and the sea gulls screeched.

  Helga pulled me to her bed and made me lie down.

  “My favorite hypochondriac, that’s who you are,” she said and smiled.

  She turned off most of the lights and sat down at the piano. She played softly, beautifully. She was a master now. I felt so good, lying there in semi-darkness.

  When Helga had finished, I stood behind her, pulled her up from the chair, turned her around towards me. I caught the smell of Vent Vert as I kissed her hands, her elbows, her neck, and it drove me wild.

  “Can I sleep with you tonight?” I asked.

  There was a long silence.

  “We better not,” she said, “we better not.”

  My arms circled her waist and I whispered her name, over and over again. My hands passed through her hair and held the back of her head. I kissed her eyes, her lips.

  “You are my counterpart in life,” I said, finally.

  I brought my hands down to her breasts and couldn’t breathe.

  “No one has ever,” she said.

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked, kissing her neck.

  “No one has ever,” she said.

  “You can sleep with me,” she whispered, “but just sleep with me, nothing else.”

  I lay down with her and we whispered a lot and I kissed almost every inch of her and buried my head between her breasts and slept in perfect peace….

  We woke up early and decided to dance. Radio East Berlin was of no help. They were talking of the Five-Year-Plan. We tuned in AFN, the American Forces Network, from the other side of town. Glenn Miller. Frank Sinatra. That was better.

  -----

  That fall, we had many dates on the eastern side of the city. Once we went to Treptow Park, which I remembered as a happy place where my parents had taken me when I was a little boy in the 1930s. But it was a happy place no more. The whole area had become a Soviet War Memorial, featuring a 38 foot statue of a Russian soldier standing atop a pedestal made from marble reclaimed from Hitler’s Chancellery. The soldier held a sword in one hand, while cradling a rescued child in the other. Helga and I agreed that holding onto a raped woman would have been more appropriate. Nor did we like the rows of granite blocks that had replaced the once beautiful lawns and that were inscribed with uplifting advice from Joseph Stalin.

  Another date was much more fun. We spent a whole day at the Müggelsee, a large lake at the edge of East Berlin. We lay in the grass and remembered things, like the day the engineer let us ride in the locomotive with him, all the way from Ziesar to Burg. We carved a heart into an oak and wrote our names inside it. I made a flute out of reeds, just as I had in Ziesar years ago. I plucked the petals of a flower; she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me. We sang for each other that day, in a row boat among the water lilies. We lay in each other’s arms and fed ducks and swans. I made a wreath of flowers and placed it on Helga’s head; she made one for me. I read poems to her, while she dreamed in the sun. She described the sunset to me, while I dreamed in her lap.

  “You will never go away, will you?” I asked.

  “Of course not, silly,” she said.

  -----

  That evening, there were fireworks everywhere. We had almost forgotten; they were celebrating the third anniversary of the DDR. We watched from Helga’s balcony and it was eerie. As the fireworks reflected off low-hanging clouds, the skyline slowly turned red and my mind took me back to earlier nights that I was so determined to forget.

  I kept seeing fiery faces leering at me from amongst the lace curtains. I saw a ghost lurking behind the tile oven that stood in the corner of the room. I could hear the tinny music in the street. Panic rose within me, choking me. And a paralyzing thought flashed through my mind: What if they use the flamethrower to kill the maggots and the rats and the flies, as they often did before digging out the dead, when we aren’t dead yet?

  Clank, clank, clank.

  Helga knew what was happening and she had just the cure. We both had that special sense of humor and she could always make us laugh, even at ourselves. That evening was no exception. Helga was funny. She had found a little book at the library, she said, entitled Hypochondria. We should read it together, she said, and all bad memories would disappear.

  “The study of hypochondria,” the booklet said, “goes back at least to the 4th century B.C., when the Greeks used the term to describe symptoms like indigestion and melancholy that were reported by men and were believed to be traceable to the hypochondrium, the region under the rib cage. If women showed similar symptoms, they were referred to as hysteria, and traced to a misalignment of the uterus. Treatments included bloodletting with leeches, inducing patients to vomit, and making them sweat.”

  We both laughed about that, especially the sweating part, given that I was always complaining about being too hot.

  “In medieval times,” the booklet continued, “similar symptoms were contributed to witchcraft and treated with potions and incantations.”

  “I need a potion,” I said, and Helga got me a drop
of Vent Vert.

  “By the 17th century,” the booklet said, “an English doctor, named Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689), who had previously studied Saint Vitus’ dance, a nervous disorder affecting children and pregnant women, made a new list of the symptoms of hypochondria. According to him, they included digestive trouble, convulsions, shortness of breath, and heart palpitations. He thought they arose from the brain and were set off by emotions, such as fear and grief.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said laughing. “Right on! It’s all in my head; I shall never take my pulse again.”

  Helga gave me a kiss and said I could sleep with her again that night.

  “Just sleeping,” she said.

  “And kissing all over,” I answered.

  “By the 18th century,” our booklet said, “a Scottish doctor, named George Cheyne (1671-1743), came along. He wrote an essay entitled English Malady, or a Treatise on Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers. He described hypochondria as “the English malady” because he found the English particularly prone to persisting in fears that they had a serious disease even after doctors had reassured them that they were healthy. He noted that the disease occurred mainly in people of high intelligence and thought it was caused by moist air, variable weather, heavy food, and sedentary living.”

  That made us both laugh some more.

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s the intelligence mixed with the moist air and my sedentary living. They should send me back to the sugar beet fields!”

  Fogg Art Museum, President and Fellows of Harvard College

  The Hypochondriac

  Honoré-Victorin Daumier, 1841

  43. Revolution

  [November 1952 – November 1953]

  During my second year at the Free University, the Cold War heated up. When visiting Helga in East Berlin, I followed my old habit of reading the poster columns at the street corners. On her side of town, they were filled with stories about the warmonger Eisenhower who, in November of 1952, had won the American presidency in a landslide and was reported to have lost no time stirring things up. I remember two stories in particular, both being endlessly discussed in early 1953. First, there was the matter of the U.S. 7th Fleet having been withdrawn from the Formosa Strait, which presumably freed Chiang Kai-shek to raid the mainland and, thus, make trouble for Mao Zedong, “our great ally in the Far East.” Second, there was the matter of the treacherous Pole who had flown a Russian MIG-15 to Denmark and, thus, given the western powers a first look at an undamaged copy of that type of plane. If one were to believe the East German press, that act alone might touch off World War III.