A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  I sniggered.

  ‘This is just like where I grow up, or where my mum’s dad lived ‒ we went there when I was a kid in the summer. Doesn’t look like this, all this green and trees and stuff, but the same place in fact. All people living on their own and at seven it’s night and there’s nothing to do except sit and complain about everything. You know, I don’t even have to get off this fucking bus to find out ‒ the people in these places, they exactly the same the world over.’

  ‘Come on, Jo,’ I said. ‘We’re only going for the day. You don’t have to talk to anyone.’

  ‘Not gonna talk to anyone, not even you, I tell you,’ Joaquin said. But then he brightened. ‘One good thing, though. This is so late a start, it’s like time for eating lunch before we start off walking. That is one thing I like about today already.’

  The driver announced with a flourish that we were arriving at our destination. He turned with a broad sweep from the main road. A glamorous blond dog leapt up from his resting place in the middle of the street. This was not somewhere he would be disturbed often, and he was going to make the most of it. A bus shelter; a couple of houses; a notice-board; a hotel or bar of some sort, all quite run down and unpainted in the middle of spurts and half-acres of uncared-for grass. It was unlike Germany, with its cared-for air. It looked abandoned. ‘And there he is,’ the bus driver said, switching off his engine. ‘Come to say hello to you. Might have known you were coming.’ The dog, by contrast with the village, was beautifully groomed and glossy, its blond tresses falling about an intelligent and amused face. This was the promised English dog. He sniffed around us, taking in our boots, socks and tucked-in trousers in a friendly way that promised to leave nothing out.

  ‘If you want something to eat,’ the driver said, settling himself on the bottom step of his bus with a cigarette, ‘that’s your only option round here. The English dog lives there. See you on Monday.’

  We didn’t ask why he said this. He was recommending, as a place to eat, the hotel, or bar, or clubhouse, a tatty mock-Tudor confection, like a barn, with an indecipherable sign hanging outside. Two tubs of last summer’s plants stood outside, straggling collections of jasmine and fuchsia. The dog led us in. Inside, the hallway was dark and wood-panelled, an old reception desk with framed certificates of legal responsibility, a couple of abstract acrylics in amateurishly brilliant colours and a photograph of Sorge in the old days. Someone had left a paperback novel on the reception desk – it looked completely unread. Joaquin picked up a menu that sat on the counter. He started to read it out loud, phonetically. I understood what he was saying. There was soup of the day; there was sausage with potatoes; there were herrings, also with potatoes; there was goulash. Nobody was about. The dog had had enough of lying on the ground. He was trotting around sniffing. From time to time he looked over his shoulder at us, placing his forepaw on the seat of an ancient armchair before moving on to a pile of old tabletop games and jigsaws, the door to what must be the kitchen.

  ‘You’ve met the employee of the month,’ a man’s voice said from above, at the top of the stairs. ‘I’ll be down in a second. He’ll show you the place in the meantime.’

  I understood then. The dog was walking around, not exploring, but indicating his favourite spots. He had our worried welfare in mind – this is where you might like to sit down, in this comfortable armchair with the interesting smell deep in the seat, this is how you might entertain yourselves while there is nothing else to do, here is the door out of which food to sustain you might emerge. It was a thoughtful dog, full of obeisance and consideration.

  ‘I’m just airing a room,’ the voice said. ‘And now I’m done. Now. Welcome to Sorge, gentlemen.’ The owner of the voice came down the stairs. He was straggling in appearance, with a beaky nose peering out between curtains of long, greying hair. His clothes were unusual: a huge black shirt, which swamped him, and loose baggy black trousers, tugged together at the waist with a brown leather belt. He was shoeless in black socks. His gait down the stairs was slow and careful, like that of a very old man, but he could only have been in his forties. He gave me, and then Joaquin, a warm but incisive look as he reached the bottom of the stairs, looking at us a couple of seconds longer than usual. ‘Welcome to Sorge,’ he said. ‘How can I help you? A couple of rooms? Or lunch and a beer? Or’ – the man’s look had assessed us by now, placed us in another category of being than customers to be polite to – ‘just a sit down and a shit before you set off on your hike? We wouldn’t charge you for that.’

  ‘Lunch would be nice,’ I said. I wondered what we had done to deserve this matiness. He was clearly in charge and not an employee. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘That is Nala,’ the man said, stressing the second syllable. ‘He comes from Romania. He was a street dog, but very intelligent, as you are going to find out.’

  This explained the bus driver’s label. To a country bus driver, all foreigners were English, a Romanian dog much the same as an English one. I had heard about this habit before, in accounts of rural life by early travel writers.

  ‘What is he, the waiter?’ I said.

  ‘No, your tour guide for the afternoon,’ the man said, chuckling with an air-filled smoker’s laugh, wheezing itself out into a few shakes of the shoulders. He had a curious accent I couldn’t quite place. Oddly, it made his German very easy to follow, a musical up and down and vowels that were almost English in their purity. I didn’t think it was a local accent. ‘You’re here to walk the Wall, I take it. Very nice. It’s Nala’s afternoon walk. He gets very excited if there are walkers on the noonday bus. He doesn’t expect any on Saturday, for obvious reasons, but he comes out anyway. Who knows? Perhaps he doesn’t know that it’s Saturday, and the bus comes, but usually no walkers. Or perhaps he quite enjoys the disappointment. That’s what I mean by excitement, the absence of disappointment, which is as good as it gets around here. Take a seat. Our waitress will be with you shortly. Any seat, any seat.’

  His conversation was that of someone wondering how he was going to fill the long hours of his day. The way he walked away, stopping to take out a handkerchief to brush some imaginary dust off a china ornament on a shelf, was the same. We sat down at a dark-stained oak table with twisted legs, very like an old English pub table.

  ‘What did he say?’ Joaquin said. I summarized, leaving out the bit about the obvious reasons for no one coming on Saturday. An unpleasant thought was forming in my mind. The bus we had come on had stopped for five minutes, then had started up and left. He had said that he would see us on Monday. Our host had said that no walkers came on Saturday for obvious reasons. And yet there was, clearly indicated on the timetable, a bus from Sorge at 18.30 p.m. We would go back to Quedlinburg on that bus, later this afternoon.

  A wail, or a groan, issued from the kitchen, as if somebody had been rudely woken up. The door slammed open. The waitress emerged.

  It is hard to explain this woman’s appearance now because so much commentary passed between Joaquin and me about it later that day and in the days that followed. We dissected it as if we were ever going to be drawn to it. It is wrong to talk about the beauty of women, but this woman’s beauty was a compelling fact that needed analysis. Was she fat but beautiful, or beautiful because fat? Was her beauty of a sort that exerted itself even through her physical substance? Would it have been still greater without it, or was she only beautiful because of the expanses of her creamy flesh, the uncanny smoothness of her complexion and wide blue eyes above a pair of fat pink cheeks? She was lovely, no doubt about it. She had the sort of loveliness that went against what the observer thought he knew about physical loveliness. You would debate it. We did. It is common when people mention a fat person to say that they moved with surprising lightness, or something of that sort. Such a description has made many fat people jump about on the spot, and perspire, attempting to live up to it. The waitress did not move with surprising lightness. She moved like the
Turandot of my dreams, a woman who regretted the brutal fact that, in the world that was and the world that should be, she was not to be carried about in a palanquin by four sweating slaves, her feet never touching the ground. Imperial feudalism has its romance, I admit. Even Brecht, in the Kaukasische Kreidekreis seems susceptible to it. In middle age I no longer resisted the charm of what must go from the world. Her beauty was of that sort, one that could not exist in a just society. For that reason I was drawn to it, her bare slapping soles, the sigh and huff of her breath as she walked, the beautiful shine of her hair, the red flash at the end of her fingers and toes. What did we want, she said. She held out no kind of promise that she would do anything to meet those wants, or even a pencil and pad to write them down. Her absence of anything resembling flirtation or charm – her solidity of assurance – was total, and compelling.

  ‘I don’t want to wait about here,’ Joaquin said, once she had left – his most flirtatious smile had been brought out for her. ‘I want to get out and be walking. I want to see the border.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘We’ll eat the sausage and pay and set off. The bus back’s at half six. We’ve got five and a half hours to walk if we want a beer at the end.’

  ‘One day we’re going to come on a holiday and we’re going to bring the van or, you know, hire a car, like the normal people.’

  ‘The normal people don’t know how good public transport is in Germany. There’s no need to spend a fortune bringing your van over, and two full days driving.’

  ‘We could sleep in the van too.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you never gave up being a student.’

  Joaquin gave me a brilliant, vulpine grin. His hair and beard were mostly grey, but his teeth were white. The food arrived. The fat girl brought us two orange plates with sausages and potatoes on them. It was almost the same as what we had ordered. She set it down with unmistakable resentment. We ate it.

  In five minutes, the time had come to set off. The proprietor appeared again to take our plates away.

  ‘The dog will follow you, whatever you do,’ he said. ‘He likes the walk. I say he’ll follow you, but in reality he’ll be showing you what you need to see. He’s done it a few times before. And then he’ll bring you back safely.’

  Nala, the dog, leapt up when we started to gather our Nordic poles and rucksacks together. He was quickly through the front door, looking back impatiently, like a tour guide with a schedule to meet. We left the hotel. We followed him through the village towards the beginning of the path along the old Wall. At one point, an old man with an Alsatian came out of a house on the other side of the street. The dog Nala started to run over, but something stopped him. He returned to our side as if the other party did not exist. It was an exquisite, almost Regency lesson in the art of social snubbing. The old man went on his way without greeting us or acknowledging Nala, in the direction of the bus stop.

  ‘So, they are shy, or they are rude, then?’ Joaquin said. It was the continuation of a discussion we had started the day before, when five different sets of walkers had bluntly refused to return a greeting. I had said that there were different standards of engagement with strangers in different cultures. Joaquin maintained that even if you’d grown up in the German Democratic Republic, you would know that it was good to say hello back when a stranger greeted you on a forest path. The conversation continued. It was a beautiful day. Soon we were off the village street and into a track between fir plantations. The air was both fresh and heady with resin. Nala was running ahead of us two or three hundred yards, pausing, looking back, waiting for us to catch up, sometimes diving into the woodland to investigate something. We came to a gate that stood open, announcing that here was the historical territory of the border between East and West Germany. The woods rang with birdsong. The trees were wilder and older than the firs, older than the Wall itself, elm and oak and beech. Underneath the canopy the dappled light was alive with butterflies, feasting.

  ‘But a girl like that,’ I continued, ‘she doesn’t know that she’s beautiful, these days, because every magazine, every television show tells her you have to be sixty kilos maximum to be beautiful.’

  ‘She knows she would be more beautiful if she is thirty kilos less, that is the truth.’

  ‘Rubbish. She was beautiful because she was the weight she was. She’d look like anyone else if she was thin.’

  In ten minutes, we came out into a wide expanse of grassland, and the preserved centre of the old border. There was a watchtower, and a twenty-foot stretch of the old Wall, bare of the graffiti that now covered both sides of the preserved fragments in Berlin. The double line of the Wall was marked in stone, either the original foundations or (I thought) laid down by some heritage organization. It looked as if it would form a satisfying basis for our afternoon walk, leading off into land where meadows and trees were growing more thickly. Nala came into his own. You could see that, as the proprietor of the hotel had said, he had done this before. He led us to the base of the watchtower, where he very deliberately pissed.

  ‘Dogs, they are all such reactionaries,’ Joaquin said. ‘I never met a dog that doesn’t make racist judgements, too.’

  Then the dog led us into the forest shade on, we thought, the former West German side. A few yards in, quite well hidden, was an old sign saying that this was the Grenze. The dog sat down, decorously posing. He waited until Joaquin had pulled out his old camera from my rucksack and taken a couple of photographs.

  ‘Very much like Mr Jingle’s sagacious dog Ponto,’ I said – I very much like The Pickwick Papers, and Joaquin, too, had read it in snatches over the years. Nala went on, leading us with careful consideration to a bench by a sculpture installation.

  ‘He thinks we need to rest,’ Joaquin said. ‘He’s crazy ‒ we’re not as old as that.’ But I thought he wanted us to admire the work of an official sculptor, arranging shards of slate in a perfect circle. That seemed to be it as far as the tour was concerned. Now Nala streaked off along the line of the Wall towards a meadow, alive with wild flowers, maiden pinks and cowslips, yellow marsh marigolds, red poppies, snake’s-head fritillaries, white frothing flowers on the surface of the waving grass as high as your waist, uncared for and untrained, a European meadow alive with flowers and butterflies, taking back the land from what, after all, had been there for less than thirty years. By the time we were old, hardly anyone would remember it. Even now nobody much under forty-five had any adult memory of what it was, and what it hoped to achieve, and what the society whose edges it marked meant, after all.

  We walked for twelve miles in total, six there and six back. We followed the line of the Wall all the way, hardly discussing it. What was there to say? I think we can say that we were more ambitious walkers than the dog Nala was quite expecting. His runs off into the forest wildness in search of fox and badger stopped; he kept to our side; towards the end he even took to flopping down and taking a rest. The signs of his early-afternoon exuberance were all over his coat. Not just burrs and fronds, but a thick coating of mud from the streams and bogs that had so urgently needed investigating. There had been nothing that we could do.

  ‘That guy is going to be so cross with us,’ Joaquin said, ‘returning his dog looking like that. He will need such a bath.’ But we underestimated Nala. Just before the edge of the village, a stream ran by the side of the road under a bridge. Nala dashed down the bank. He plunged into the fast-flowing water, clear as gin. He was out again, shining, soaked and half his size. After shaking himself thoroughly, considerately distant from us, he was as clean as if he had spent the afternoon dozing in a chair.

  ‘This is the most sagacious dog I ever met,’ I said.

  When we got back the proprietor was outside the hotel, not waiting for us but passing the time in his long, empty day. He looked quite satisfied, as if two customers were all he asked for.

  ‘That was a good long walk,’ he said. ‘He’ll w
ant his bed now. Good for you. Do you want a beer or something?’

  We thought we did – it was still half an hour before the bus was due. Walking is thirsty work, as we now commented to each other. (We always say this at the end of a walk.) We sat down on the bench next to the entrance. The beer was excellent. The proprietor hung around.

  ‘Did you see anyone on your walk? Just someone in the village? That guy, the guy with the big dog, he’s typical. You won’t get Nala within ten feet of that dog, since the guy hit him with his walking stick. It’s the descendant of one of the border guard dogs, that one. It’s hard on Nala not to have any company. He likes it when walkers come ‒ he waits for the bus.

  ‘Do you know about the village? Well, you know about the Wall, anyway. Nice walk, isn’t it? Because it’s so close to the Wall, the only people who were ever allowed to live here were Party stalwarts. The Wall came down nearly thirty years ago and still the same people are here. That old guy you saw, he believes in Marxism-Leninism like crazy. They talk to each other but they do not talk to me, I can promise you that. I don’t know if they would talk to Sybille or not. The boot’s on the other foot there. She won’t talk to them. Too old, apparently.’

  ‘Why don’t they talk to you?’ I said. I didn’t quite feel like starting to talk about ideology. That is sensible middle age starting to bite. When I was young, I wouldn’t have cared that the bus was going to arrive in ten minutes, that it wasn’t worth starting an argument. I would have condensed my crisp judgements and opinions still further. I would have changed minds in ten minutes. Joaquin was cleaning the grass from the bottom of his boots with his Swiss Army knife. I knew he was listening to try to make out what we were discussing.

  ‘This place, it’s an old youth hostel for the Party. The kids came down here for a holiday. They had uplifting games, went running in the forest, all that. After the changes, it sat empty for fifteen years. Nobody wanted it. I heard about it and I bought it for really nothing, twenty thousand euros. I could have put it on my credit card. I was going to turn it into a luxury hotel ‒ I had all sorts of ideas. It’s in my family, the hospitality industry, it’s what my father did and I grew up in that world. But we did up two bedrooms and two bathrooms, out of twenty-four, and then the builder disappeared and the whole project ran into the sand. For that lot, the place was like a showcase for them. It’s like the most perfect piece of German socialist design. It was criminal to doll up those two bathrooms as far as they’re concerned. I’m using those rooms for storage. Do you want to see the old rooms?’