“I should be careful,” he laughed. “I cannot say Ossi if anyone from the East is nearby. I like having this problem.”
When the meeting concluded, Gwen and Herb declined the bus ride back to the hotel. They hurried toward upscale Kurfurstendamm Avenue where they found crowds of Ossis, all wearing muted blue synthetic fabrics. Many stood slack-jawed in front of couture and high-end furniture store display windows. Others got in and out of tiny, smoke-spewing cars apparently made of fiberglass. It’s a circus stunt, thought Gwen, as seven Ossis crammed themselves into one of these toy vehicles. There were Wessis, too, stuffing Deutschmarks into Ossis’ pockets. Bottles and large plastic cups of beer were circulating.
Both Ossis and Wessis looked dazed, which gave Gwen a sense of déjà vu. People were in the same mixed state of relief and trepidation she had experienced three weeks earlier after a major earthquake shook San Francisco. They had survived the cataclysm and were now unmoored in an altered world.
Across the avenue, she saw an elegantly dressed lady leaning over a second story windowsill, utterly motionless. Gwen thought it was a mannequin until she noticed the woman’s fingers moving. She was pinching herself.
Dinner that night was in a museum of musical instruments. Gwen and Herb sat with Peter Ramburg again, this time surrounded by clavichords and violins from the sixteenth century. Gwen was concerned the East German government might try to stop the mass exodus. She remembered stories from the 1960s of people shot in the back as they climbed the wall to escape the totalitarian regime. What if East German soldiers invaded West Berlin, she asked. Could the situation escalate into global war?
Peter reassured her that East Germany as a political entity was swiftly disintegrating. It was too disorganized to halt the flood. His brother, a West German diplomat, had told him East German officials were resigning en masse. There were rumors the Stasi, East German secret police, were shredding documents in anticipation of the government’s collapse. Peter had also heard about a spontaneous celebration underway where the wall ran alongside Brandenburg Gate, a short stroll from the museum. He urged them to accompany him there after dessert. Gwen glanced uneasily at Herb.
“Why not,” Herb said cheerfully.
The sidewalks were congested with pedestrians streaming toward a wide street that ended abruptly at the nine-foot wall. Once the three reached this terminus, the crowd blocked their view. All they could see was Brandenburg Gate looming on the other side. A bronze charioteer atop the Gate’s columns, a winged goddess of victory, held the reins of four horses galloping eastward, toward Moscow.
While Herb conferred with Peter on the wisdom of going any farther, Gwen stared at riflemen in Soviet army uniforms across the street. They were goose-stepping between pieces of World War II vintage artillery. Peter explained it was a memorial commemorating Russian soldiers who had died here during World War II. These Red Army troops, ferried into West Berlin from the Soviet Union, now frozen at attention, ignored the tumult. Above the ominous tableau was a statue of a caped Russian, his rifle shouldered, his hand open in a gesture of peace. She turned to ask Peter more, but he had vanished.
Herb insisted on moving forward. Frightened yet unwilling to be left alone, Gwen followed him. They inched a few feet closer, and the wall, so emblematic of impending Cold War Armageddon during her adolescence, came into sight. Instead of a battle, this was a love-in. Hundreds of denim-clad young people sat on the wall’s narrow top, strumming guitars, rolling marijuana joints, chipping desultorily at the bricks and mortar with hatchets, hammers, even pocket knives. Overhead, suspended by a crane, was a prime-time television news anchor from the United States. It was astounding and silly, momentous and ludicrous. She laughed and felt tears on her face. Without a single bomb exploding, without a gunshot, the Cold War had just ended. Gwen was in the middle of a closely packed, hysterical mob, penned in by strangers, unable to move, and she wasn’t afraid.
Aware that Herb was drifting away, she grabbed him. They surged in a tide of compressed flesh toward the wall and rebounded. They swayed amid the vibrating mass. Ahead, the crowd’s density blocked further movement. Fortunately, the mob was not frantic at this impasse and didn’t crush those in its way. Herb twisted his head around to look back at her. Gwen was shocked by his appearance, flushed and wild-eyed. She had seen him be passionate at work, but that was the focused emotion of a logician arguing about which diagnosis was correct, a detective teasing out the truth from inert data. Herb was not focused now. He shouted and gesticulated, pushed toward the wall and laughed at the slapstick of his progress impeded. He raised his fists in joy.
In the din, Gwen couldn’t hear a word Herb said. It was nevertheless evident that he had surrendered far more of himself to the collective mania than she had. She used hand signals to contend they were near enough to the wall. Getting closer wasn’t important. Herb conceded. They found a new current, flowing laterally, that led to a pocket of less density. They still couldn’t hear each other. After an hour watching teenage high jinks on top of the wall, they agreed in pantomime it was time to leave.
At midnight, the impeccably landscaped Tiergarten was full of ecstatic Berliners crisscrossing its boulevards and radial walkways. The fog had thinned enough for moonlight to guide them. Once the ringing in their ears ceased, Gwen and Herb talked of where they had been in 1961 when the wall first divided Berlin, what they had been doing, what they had been like then. From there, they roamed to families, marriages, and children. Finally, they got to Kevin.
Herb knew nothing about Kevin’s love affair after Marco died, so she told him about Barry. Herb also had something to share, but it required personal exposure at deeper level than he had risked so far. He wavered before yielding again to the impulsivity that possessed him at the wall.
“Did you know Kevin and I went to the same therapist?”
“Castlewright?”
Startled, he said, “Yes…what did Kevin tell you about him?”
“You mean what Castlewright was like,” she asked coyly, “or what they talked about?”
He blushed.
“Kevin shared details. Don’t be embarrassed, Herb. I’ve spent time in therapy, too. More than Kevin. I bet more than you and Kevin combined.”
This admission put him at ease.
“Now that Kevin’s gone, the only people who know I saw Castlewright are my wife and my best friend.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll keep it a secret. Maybe we can talk about our own details one of these days.”
“Let’s do that,” said Herb with a faint smile.
V
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, they were heading east on an underground train. It emerged onto tracks rising two stories above street level. The fog had ascended overnight, forming a thick layer above the city. All of Berlin was exposed now beneath a dull metal sky.
Herb searched the horizon for a television tower, erected after he had lived here, which marked Alexanderplatz. He used it as a landmark to find familiar buildings—the Dom cathedral, government offices on Unter den Linden, the Bode museum. Once Herb recognized the East Berlin skyline, he was grateful the train had been so crowded that he and Gwen had to sit apart. He had expected this trip would revive painful memories but was unprepared for the distress he was feeling. He kept a vice grip on the chrome railing as neighborhoods unchanged after thirty years appeared. Looking at his white knuckles, trying to understand his reaction, he suddenly relaxed. Curiosity replaced panic.
In the summer of 1959, Herb was between his junior and senior year at Cornell. The United Nations had stationed his father with an East Berlin delegation attempting to de-escalate international tension over the large number of German Democratic Republic citizens fleeing to the west. He arranged for Herb to be hired as a temporary typist.
Herb still vividly remembered the anticipation he had felt at La Guardia and his subsequent disappointment with East Berlin—a gray, lifeless city. There was nothing to do other than work. Although he’d been tutored by a
German graduate student and was semi-conversant in the language, no one would talk to him once they found out he was an American. Young East Germans assumed he was a spy from China under Stasi orders to pose as a tourist and entrap them into making subversive statements.
Herb spent his free time reading the Existentialists, especially Sartre. He stood in line at post offices and rode buses to overhear bits of conversation which he then transcribed. He planned to use his notes as dialogue in an absurdist play.
A week before Herb was to fly back to New York, his father took a rare day off so the two could visit museums. He was particularly interested in an exhibit of ancient coins that had just opened at the Bode.
It was hot and humid when they left the dingy studio apartment where Herb slept on a couch. Wanting to avoid the crowds, his father was irritated with Herb for delaying their departure by five minutes. Inside the museum, they had to climb a flight of stairs. At the top, his father grabbed Herb. Pale, sweating profusely, he said a few words in garbled Chinese and collapsed on the marble floor. Herb could recall jarring images of the events that followed but only guess at their actual sequence. His own scream for help. An ambulance’s klaxon horn. His father’s cold skin. Pacing the empty hallways of Charite’ Hospital. The repulsive odor of disinfectants. A German doctor saying, “I am sorry. Ist tot. Is dead.”
Herb had been a dilettante at college, toying with sciences and humanities. After that summer, he never took another course in philosophy. He never completed his play. He returned to Cornell and threw himself into the pre-medical curriculum.
Although the line was short, Herb and Gwen had to wait an hour to get through Checkpoint Charlie. All the GDR border guards were on the other side, inspecting passports and waving through the East German horde going west. A single unarmed functionary, unfamiliar with the crossing protocol, was gate-keeping for anyone entering East Berlin.
They walked to Unter den Linden, the central esplanade of East Berlin. Here were the same eighteenth century rococo buildings and spare, postwar communist construction Herb had seen in 1959. Only the boulevard’s double rows of lindens were different, bare skeletons in winter rather than the leafy arbor of his memory.
No, he realized, something else was missing from the cityscape. None of it was imbued with menace. They were facing the Russian Embassy, a clunky, wedding-cake-shaped, marble edifice. Hammers and sickles were etched above each window. It was laughably pretentious.
He sat on a bench, trying to make sense of this disconnect between the inanity of what he was observing and the terror and alienation he remembered. He took his pulse, a calm sixty beats per minute. He saw Gwen looking worriedly at him.
“I’m all right. Just remembering. I lived here thirty years ago, before the wall went up.”
Gwen didn’t interrupt his account of that summer.
When he finished, she said, “I think you get to decide where we go next.”
Herb studied his map, calculating directions and distances.
“First Pergamon, then Dom, then Alexanderplatz. That avoids backtracking.”
“Such efficiency!” Gwen said, patting him on the arm.
“Hey, thanks for listening.”
He gave her a little hug. She looked surprised. He was tempted to ask her whether she had ever seen him touch a person who wasn’t a patient, but he knew the answer.
VI
CROSSING A SHORT BRIDGE led them to an island in the Spree River that housed five museums. Herb had no desire to re-visit the Bode. He followed Gwen into the Pergamon, which contained the ancient Greek altar she had wanted to see since college. Built in the second century BC, buried for millennia, then excavated by a German engineer in the late 1800s and transported to Berlin, the altar was arguably the most exquisite sculpture of the Hellenistic era.
They entered an immense room brightly illuminated by a frosted-glass ceiling. Gwen was encircled by marble panels that rippled with wrestling figures. Seven feet high, one hundred yards in length, the frieze depicted a mythic gigantomachy—a war between Greek deities and a race of giants. Gods and goddesses leapt, shoved, and stomped, defending their new order against the sons of Gaia, Earth’s mother. The battle would be a victory for Zeus’s clan over a matriarchal world—a victory for culture and history over chaos.
Once she had absorbed the sheer size of the frieze and assimilated the massive effort that must have gone into creating it, she looked closely at the carvings. Muscle details, precise as anatomy lessons, filled the panels. Deltoids, glutei, pronators, latissimi dorsi, many others she could no longer name. Not in a lifetime, she thought, could any individual have made more than a small part of this frieze. Who were the sculptors? What were their lives like? The bodies they had shaped, motion frozen forever in stone, were voluptuous. They made her think of Rick, of their early days together. She regretted her own ability to love passionately had been so transient.
Gwen’s reverie soured. She looked for Herb and saw him sitting idly on a bench. She checked her watch. An hour had passed. She forced Rick out of her mind and walked the full length of the frieze one last time.
She was struck by something obvious. How she had missed it before? Only the front and side of each god or giant was revealed. The back of each figure was embedded in stone, unformed in amorphous, infinite space. This frieze was more than art. It was a metaphysical treatise.
Gwen was inspired. She fantasized taking up a hammer and chisel again. In college, she had broken through once, reaching the point where her muscle endurance and ability to visualize what needed to be removed from a stone block were sufficient to complete a work—a bust of Eva’s head. She would readily admit it generous to call the piece folk art. Nonetheless, she was proud of it.
Gwen massaged her triceps and biceps. Why not try, she thought.
Herb was beside her.
“Meet your expectations?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” she said with a mysterious smile.
VII
THE FOG HAD BURNED away by mid-afternoon. A low winter sun glared upon Alexanderplatz as they walked to the center of the square’s sunken floor. Herb and Gwen were surrounded by plain, rectangular office buildings made of crumbling concrete. He was telling her about the East German secret police.
“In 1959, I heard a third of the GDR population, including children, were being paid by the Stasi to spy on their family and fellow citizens. I bet some of these buildings still house Stasi operatives. Or they did until yesterday.”
Peering over this grim shrine to state loyalty was the television tower, a great needle with a bulbous midsection, like a snake whose swallowed prey was stuck in its throat. Gwen was repelled.
“How grotesque. The Russians had a sense of style. Why didn’t they help?”
Herb began explaining how Alexanderplatz had been the artistic and bohemian center of Berlin before the Soviet occupation, but his bursts of laughter kept interrupting the story.
“I’m glad you appreciate my irony,” said Gwen as she flipped through the pages of her guidebook.
I can laugh in this place, Herb marveled. Thirty years ago, it was my touchstone for existential dread. Alexanderplatz seems ridiculous now.
He was unburdened yet not quite free of guilt. Was he being disrespectful of his father? That question stopped the laughter.
My sad case of a father, he thought, all about duty, never about humor, let alone affection. Horrific as it was to watch him die, helpless and lonely as I felt, what exactly did I lose that day? Not much.
Herb had witnessed so many deaths since that first one in East Berlin. He had a thorough grasp of the physiologic changes and had seen the gamut of emotions displayed by the dying and their loved ones. But he hadn’t considered his own father’s death in those terms before.
What must have gone through his mind, Herb wondered, being confronted with the haphazard and pointless end of his existence. The poor man had no scaffolding, nothing other than the material present, for perspective. Death couldn’
t have been acceptable to him because he never could have felt his life was complete. He was entirely too linear.
Herb willingly acknowledged he would die in the finite future. He could even tolerate the idea of it happening here, right now.
Why? Because I’m connected to others in ways my father shunned, because I’ll be missed, and that will be enough.
Herb laughed again.
VIII
AT MIDNIGHT, THEY WERE back in West Berlin, sipping coffee in a Kurfurstendamm café and talking about Kevin. They had to leave for the airport in a few hours and decided to postpone sleep until the plane ride home. Herb asked Gwen if she knew Kevin had been medicating himself with prednisone during his final months.
“He was taking steroids? Why?”
“For fatigue. I think it was making him manic.”
“He never seemed manic to me.”
“He could rein it in when he wanted to, but he let it out with me. Did he ever tell you about his virtue-knockout thought experiments?”
“What?”
“I may have been the only one he told. Well, once he got juiced on prednisone, he became convinced he had made an important discovery. He had a new method for testing ethical principles. He believed it would change the whole conduct of philosophical inquiry.”
“Oh my God! He definitely didn’t share that delusion with me.”
“I’m not sure it was all delusional. It made sense…sort of. He said he could determine the validity of any particular virtue by performing a thought experiment.”
“A thought experiment?”
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