They board the train, and she sits opposite him. He senses that she doesn’t wish to speak during the ride. This is a tendency he’s already noticed: Berliners don’t talk while riding the train. They keep to themselves. It’s as though they’re charging their batteries before emerging into the world and using their voices. He watches her on the sly; her eyes are large and blue, with small, dark slivers that break up the color. Her eyebrows are blond and practically invisible, so fine that he can only see them when sunlight bursts through the window. There’s something brittle about her face, except for her mouth. Her mouth is wide for a woman, which makes her nose seem too narrow and delicate for the rest of her face. She’s dressed in black. Her nylons are nearly frayed through, and there’s something shabby and coarse about her outfit. She has an average figure, borderline gangly, and she’s wearing flat-soled sneakers as if she’s trying to make herself appear smaller. When they stood on the platform, he noticed that she was only an inch or so shorter than he.
Her shoulder bag, an army-green canvas affair, is lying in her lap. She drums on it with her fingers while staring past him. Then she begins to rummage in her bag; he glimpses an iPod, an empty bottle of nail polish, and a tattered paperback. He tilts his head a bit to read the title on the cover: Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters. She removes a pack of nicotine gum, then digs out a knotty gray lump from one corner of her mouth and deposits it in one of the empty slots in the pack. The wrapper crinkles when she opens a new piece. She pops it into her mouth and continues to chew her restlessness away.
They get off at Hackescher Markt, then cross an expansive plaza filled with restaurants and cafés and kiosks. He takes in the colorful parasols, the aroma of coffee, and the young, well-dressed people standing shoulder to shoulder and sharing earbuds. Street hawkers sell homemade jewelry from their kiosks and blankets. One of them says hello to Bea, who clearly knows him. He looks Latin American; at his stand, wristwatches gleam next to multicolored pearl necklaces and wide tin bracelets and leather leashes. A man with skin as dark as night is blowing soap bubbles that turn into miniature rainbows before bursting in the wind. Andreas almost can’t believe it’s the same city that Veronika lives in.
They pass a Starbucks. People by the window are sitting in tall, un-ergonomic stools, writing on their laptops. On the sidewalk next door, orange plastic chairs that are wet with rain surround several round tables. In one window—which doesn’t indicate whether it’s a shop, café, or movie theater—is a bust of Laurel and Hardy with apple-red cheeks and bowler hats, and in the other is an old television surrounded by film spools. The sign above the entrance reads in curvy neon letters: Café Cinema. Bea pushes open the door.
“This is where I work,” she says.
Andreas looks around the cramped, oblong room. There’s a bar at the far end, and Bea hugs the blonde behind the counter. Dangling lamps faintly illuminate the wooden tables with flickering candlelight, making the customers forget that it’s still only afternoon outside. The furniture is dated, and along with the faded clippings in glass frames on the wall, it tells stories from the old days. Behind a wrecked piano, the wall is covered with film posters, German titles he’s never heard of. He scrutinizes them to find one he recognizes, but gives up.
“Would you like a coffee?” Bea asks.
He asks for a beer instead, though he’s not sure why. He’s never been a café-going type; he becomes uncomfortable. All the exotic names and coffee varieties make him feel like an outsider, and whenever some teenage barista asks him whether he would like a double shot, macchiato or Americano, he never knows how to respond. Maybe that’s why he’d rather have a beer. He’s not required to choose.
They take a seat by the window. The place is unassuming and pleasant. “I often come here, even when I’m not working,” Bea says, “though the darkness in here doesn’t fit my easygoing nature.” He can’t tell whether she’s being serious, but her cheerful laughter convinces him that she is.
“Did you know this is the oldest café in the neighborhood?”
He looks at her, confused. “It’s my first time in Berlin. So, no, I didn’t know that.”
She laughs again, mildly. “Oh, right.”
She fills him in on the café’s history, and he listens to her voice, which is as soft as the lining of a jewelry box and stands in stark contrast to the four-letter words she uses.
A tall girl approaches to say hello to Bea, who stands. The two women kiss each other’s cheeks. He watches Bea, already feeling as though he knows her. She’s close to smiling during the entire conversation, and her hands flutter up and down to emphasize her words. She sits down and apologizes for the disruption.
No worries, he’s quick to tell her. Then he asks, “Where do you live?”
“In Kreuzberg. I’m studying social science at Humboldt University and work here to finance my studies. I’ve also got a scholarship from BAfög, which helps a bit,” she explains. “What about you?”
As he tells her of his own studies, he feels like a broken record. He doesn’t know her well enough to tell her the truth: that all his years at the university have been wasted.
“What about your love life?” she asks. He considers a moment. Should he tell the truth or his version of it? Then he hears himself explain.
“I can no longer recall whether we were in love. Maybe we were. We were together for two and a half years. In the beginning we would go out to restaurants, to the movie theater. We moved in together and talked about having kids, but in the end we just ended up on the couch, watching TV like an old married couple. Our relationship stopped evolving, maybe because we were numbed by the flickering light of the TV screen. The love just trickled away like dry sand through our fingers.” Andreas looks at Bea and awaits her reaction. She stares at him with her round eyes, and he goes on. “We broke up during the commercials between two programs. I’ve forgotten which one of us actually took the initiative for once, but it didn’t matter: We were in agreement.”
It’s been six months since then, and he still misses Lisa.
Bea gives him a sympathetic glance, and he feels momentarily insecure. Has he told her too much about himself? Has he exposed himself? Has he laid it on too thick? Her facial expression removes all doubt. His little story has made an impression on her. She smiles as if to console him, and he feels a close connection between them. He likes that they are here together, he and his cousin, his new cousin. He’d like to get to know her, and he needs her help because there are a number of decisions he must make concerning his father’s death. He’s the executor for a dead man in a country he doesn’t know. How is he supposed to make decisions about a man he never met? He doesn’t know what Peter enjoyed doing, what he liked and didn’t like. This makes him sad.
He asks guardedly, “Isn’t Veronika his closest relative?”
“We can’t ask her to be the executor,” Bea says, picking up on his meaning. “She’s just not capable of it.”
Bea offers to help because Peter was, after all, her uncle. Andreas is relieved, and they agree to meet the next day.
She stands up and fetches a cup of coffee and another beer. The bust of Laurel and Hardy sits in the window, their backs turned; he wants to touch it, to feel what it’s made of. Though he’s close enough to reach it, he suppresses the urge and shakes off the memory of Lisa, while Bea exchanges a few words with the young woman behind the bar.
He thinks once again of his visit to Veronika’s. There was something sad about his aunt, something incomplete, as if God’s creative juices had ceased to flow when Veronika came into the world. For a moment, he forgets that he doesn’t believe in God, and he allows himself to be pulled along by this stream of thought. Veronika has suffered in her life. The atmosphere in her apartment is thick with her hard life and the grief she feels over her brother. A life filled with disappointment. Andreas feels bad for her. She dodged his questions when he asked what his father did for a living. There was something about her behavior, as if she
felt he was confronting her, but why? Bea could probably tell him.
He watches the two women behind the bar. They laugh at something Bea says. He studies her as she effortlessly foams milk for her coffee. The whir of the machine reaches him through the music, which plays softly under the ceiling. With her coffee in one hand and his beer in the other, she returns to their table.
She sets the beer down in front of him. He drinks slowly from the bottle and then positions it perfectly on the wet ring it had made. She starts talking about the music. Ani DiFranco is one of her favorites, but Andreas doesn’t know her. Bea’s telephone rings. She speaks quickly. He notices her chipped nail polish. When she ends the call, he tries to catch a name, but all he hears her say is good-bye. He wants to ask her if she has a boyfriend. Because she’d asked him, it doesn’t seem wrong or pushy, yet he decides not to. Girls like Bea always have boyfriends, and now she’ll probably go see him.
She tilts her head to one side and purses her lips. “I need to get going, unfortunately. I’m going to see my . . . sweetheart. It’s kind of new,” she adds, as if apologizing.
He nods, understanding, and they finish their drinks in silence.
She gives him a hug outside the café, and he feels that he has to say something.
“I would like to meet the doctor,” he says impulsively, which surprises him.
“The doctor?”
He convinces Bea to briefly tell him about her and Veronika’s visit to the hospital and how the doctor told them of Peter’s death. Remembering him, her face grows sad. Her tone of voice reminds him that it’s only been a few days.
“I would like to meet him,” he repeats, without knowing why he feels this need.
“But you know how he died.”
“I would just like to hear it from him.”
7
STEFAN
East Berlin, July 1976
The needle rasped across the vinyl record. A ball of dust had grown behind it, and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run was transformed into white noise that brought Stefan to his feet. One of the half-empty beer bottles on the small Formica table tipped over and slowly poured its contents onto the carpet. Ulf picked it up as Stefan carefully brushed the delicate needle off with a hand broom. He slowly rotated the record between his two index fingers before thoroughly cleaning side one again. He set the needle in the groove, and the intro to “Thunder Road” began to boom through the loudspeakers. Ulf jammed along to the refrain on his imaginary guitar as the smoke from Stefan’s cigarette spiraled toward the ceiling. They had no plans for the afternoon except for listening to records and sharing the rest of the Radeberger beers on the table.
Ulf had what everyone envied: an uncle in the West who brought cigarettes, chocolate, LPs, and nylon stockings for his mother and sister. The last time, Uncle Arno returned with a curling iron, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. The records were sent to Uncle Arno from the United States, and he convinced Ulf that he was the only one in the entire GDR who now owned both.
He heard a gentle rapping at the door through Clarence Clemons’s saxophone solo. Stefan’s mother put her head in. “Can you go down and see where Alexander went? He’s been standing in line for two hours.”
At the sight of Ulf, her eyes changed expression. Stefan read her glance instantly, as if it were spelled out. When will that boy cut his hair? When will he get a job? He knew what she was thinking, and yet her kind nature caused her to hold her tongue. Ulf had practically lived with them since elementary school. She’d open her door to him whenever Ulf’s parents were fall-down drunk—consumed by mutual hatred for each other—and laid waste to the house, throwing everything that wasn’t nailed down. She was his embrace, his warmth, his refuge. After supper she always left a covered plate of food in the kitchen in case Ulf came over. Now he was twenty, the same age as Stefan. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Ulf; it was more an inner disquiet. She couldn’t help but drag him into those thoughts and worries a mother has for her son, and with Ulf that amounted to three sons.
They found Alexander standing in front of the butcher’s shop. From a distance Stefan noted that his brother’s hair had grown long during the summer, and he recalled that time after summer vacation when Alexander was sent home from school with a note in his backpack because his hair fell past his ears.
Ulf said good-bye to them and crossed the street to catch a tram. Finally, it was Alexander’s turn. The butcher’s apron was splotched with red stains, and his hands were smeared with blood. Behind him, his wife was slicing pork. She handed her husband some slices, and he packed them into crinkly paper. When they were younger, the brothers had secretly stared at the enormous breasts that had caused her apron to swell, but time had sunk its teeth into her and gravity now dragged them downward; the boys had found other, younger breasts to admire.
On the way home, they mostly discussed girls or politics. The brothers’ parents always spoke apologetically of the state, as if it was their fault it repressed its own people. When they discussed the party, it was with regret, and though they poked fun at the head of state, Erich Honecker, their mother would still hang his portrait on the wall today. They believed in communism, just not in their leaders who practiced it. They were corrupt and greedy and masked their greed behind rote ideological phrases. The Wall was a constant reminder of what country they lived in.
Worker and peasant state, they snorted. The workers and peasants were hostages on a playground run by a bunch of avaricious men. Stefan’s family watched Western news, even though it was verboten. Although authorities kept an eye on which way antennas were turned on the rooftops, many families turned their antennas anyway. When Stefan’s parents saw an antenna turned toward ARD or ZDF, they knew yet another East German had been successful in conquering the Wall. No one said anything, but the entire Lachner family smiled in their characteristic, wide-lipped way, visible in every photo in every album on the bookshelf.
They despised the state for transforming their country into a prison, but they couldn’t vocalize their feelings, especially today. Aunt Karin was coming for a visit. So today all their views had to be bottled up or tucked away at the bottom of a box in the attic. Though the cupboards were crammed with aversion and drawers teemed with defiance, they weren’t a disobliging family. They simply couldn’t see any connection between the ideology and the reality, and they couldn’t understand why Aunt Karin was an informant for Stasi. For this reason, no one else in the family invited her to visit anymore, but Stefan and Alexander’s mother, with her butter-soft heart, still sent invitations with Karin’s name on them.
They handed her the package from the butcher. She removed the meat, sautéed it, and let the cubes crumble in the sizzling, red soljanka soup already bubbling aromatically on the stove.
Their aunt arrived at six o’clock and immediately started questioning Alexander about his studies, then Stefan about his work at the chemical plant. There was something admirable about the way Alexander spoke to her. Though his tone was always a little mocking, he never let on that the family knew her secret. Knew was maybe an exaggeration since they’d never had their suspicions confirmed, but they nonetheless regarded it as an established fact. There was something about the way she asked questions, the way she observed them all with barely stifled contempt for their life and the way they chose to live it, and Alexander had a lot of fun with her. When she spotted the portrait of Honecker, she tilted her head and, like a schoolgirl with a crush, smiled at the leader of state. They all saw it, and every single one of them felt their suspicion was confirmed.
Then Alexander began to enthusiastically recite the story of the Hecht family, whom he’d heard of in his medical studies. Using an old cement mixer, they had constructed a catapult to shoot the father, the mother, and their three children—ages four, six, and eight—over the Wall near Ackerstrasse. The father had calculated the angle so that they would land on the sidewalk on Bernauer Strasse, and from there they wou
ld start their new life in the West. Alexander’s father gave his son a disapproving smirk, and Aunt Karin listened, indignant, her eyes wide, while everyone around the table suppressed the laughter that would have caused them to spray soup all over the table.
After supper, Stefan and Alexander went to their room. Their father sank deeper into his recliner, while the two sisters slowly wore him out with childhood memories and chatter about acquaintances who’d moved to Erfurt and girlfriends who’d married men named Jürgen.
Not until he’d heard the door close did Stefan dare put his Springsteen record on again, this time on side two. He’d concealed the records between books on the shelf in the hope that Ulf would forget them. Stefan had more use for them than his friend. As the needle scratched across the record, Alexander tapped a Karo out of his cigarette pack. Stefan looked up to his brother for his courage and intelligence. Alexander’s sharp wit was his driving force, and Stefan envied his intellect. With the possible exception of finding a girlfriend, nothing seemed difficult for him. Stefan had just met Nina, an eighteen-year-old hairdressing student from Biesdorf. A sweet cloud of perfume followed her, as did her soft, curly hair. He didn’t even care that she wore glasses. Something fluttered in his chest whenever he thought of her.
“What’s that record called?”
“Born to Run,” Stefan said. “Do you like it?”
“Born to Run?” His brain once again occupied, Alexander grew quiet. His attention wasn’t on the music, and it wasn’t on Stefan, but on a thought turning in his head. He squinted.
“One day, little brother . . .” With a sudden gravity in his eyes, Alexander looked at him as the cigarette smoke spiraled from his lips into his nostrils. “One day you and I will make our escape.”
8
PETER
East Berlin, July 1976
The thrill he’d felt following his meeting at the Ministry for State Security was suddenly forgotten. All he could think about at that moment was the little envelope with the Danish postmark. He glanced at the sender’s name again. Elisabeth had changed pens between the letters b and e; the line was thicker, darker, bluer. The envelope itself was light. He weighed it in his hand and guessed that the letter could be no more than a single page. He felt a strong urge to tear it open immediately, but he would wait a little while longer. To look forward to something and yet have the courage to delay your pleasure was a sign of self-control.
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