Sabine
A knock at the door startles us out of the silence and despondency into which we have sunk.
I get up from the kitchen table and go to answer it. It’s our neighbour from the third floor, Herr Schiller. His huge frame fills the doorway and in front of his oversize belly he is carrying a large, lidded earthenware dish from which the rich, warm smell of cooking is rising. I realise, suddenly, that I’m very hungry.
“Guten Tag, Fräulein Neumann,” he says making a small bow. Herr Schiller is always unfailingly polite.
“Guten Tag, Herr Schiller. What a pleasant surprise.”
“I have made a large quantity of fried potato and cabbage,” he says, looking down at the dish in his great paw like hands, “and thought you, your mother and sister might like to share it with me.”
“That sounds wonderful,” I say inviting him into our apartment.
It is a kind gesture, typical of Herr Schiller who is always so generous towards us. At Christmas he brings us a goose or a turkey (we never ask him where he finds these treats, suspecting that his methods may be not entirely legal). During the winter months he helps us carry coal up from the cellar, and when it snows he fetches his shovel and clears the pavement outside the building. In 1942 he was away at the front when his wife was killed by a bomb that destroyed the building she was in. They didn’t have any children.
He follows me into the kitchen and his entrance has an immediate effect on our sombre mood. Brigitta jumps up from the table and runs to Herr Schiller giving him a big hug. He is like a substitute father for her.
“Careful,” he laughs, “this dish is very hot.” He sets the dish down in the middle of the table.
“Herr Schiller has brought us some food to share,” I say.
Mother manages to rouse herself and thanks him for his generosity. She busies herself fetching plates from the cupboard whilst I open a tin of meat and cut it into slices. The business of preparing lunch makes us forget, for a moment, the new situation in Berlin. Herr Schiller spoons out generous portions of his potato and cabbage mixture and we sit down to our meal.
We eat for a few moments in silence. Fried cabbage and potato is simple, comforting food and never tasted so good. Then Herr Schiller asks, “You have heard the news?”
“We’ve more than heard it,” I say. “This morning Brigitta and I experienced it first hand.”
As we eat, Brigitta and I take it in turns to describe the events of the morning - the confusion at Friedrichstrasse station, the S-bahn employee telling everyone to go and buy a newspaper, the guards at the Brandenburger Tor, the barbed wire at Potsdamer Platz and Dieter on the other side of the wire.
“He was just standing there,” says Brigitta, her mouth full of fried potato, “and I ran towards him and…”
I kick her ankle under the table and give an infinitesimal shake of my head. I don’t want her worrying Mother with the story of how the guard pointed his rifle at her. That would be too much for Mother to take, especially after what happened to Father.
“…and we waved to him,” she finishes by saying.
Mother is busy dishing out more potato and cabbage and hasn’t noticed anything. But Herr Schiller looks from me to Brigitta as if he knows there is more to our story than we are letting on. He heard the news on the radio this morning and is appalled by what has happened.
“As a young man,” he says, waving his fork in the air, “I believed in the principles of a Communist state – equality and sharing. But what we have now is oppression and dictatorship. They are trying to keep people here by force and that is unforgivable.”
When we have finished eating, Mother clears away the plates and asks Herr Schiller if he would like some tea. There’s no coffee in East Berlin at the moment.
Herr Schiller wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and lumbers to his feet. “Thank you, but no. I have…things I need to do.” We wait for him to explain, but he is silent. Then he says, “I will come and see you all in a few days.” He inclines his head to each of us in turn. “Please don’t trouble yourself, Fräulein Neumann, I can see myself out.” He picks up the empty earthenware dish and leaves.
With the departure of Herr Schiller a gloom settles on our little household once more. Mother says she has a headache and is going to lie down. Brigitta takes her book of fairy stories from the living room and disappears with it to the bedroom, wanting to escape the events of the morning in tales of captured princesses and evil witches. No one will miss me for a couple of hours so I decide to go out rather than hang around the apartment, worrying about the future.
This time I am unable to avoid Frau Lange who is on her way up the stairs just as I am going down. I see her stick-like figure and the top of her grey head before she sees me.
As always I do my best to be polite. “Guten Tag, Frau Lange.”
I have no idea if she was ever married but, like all German women of a certain age, she is known as Frau whereas I sometimes feel as if I will always be an unmarried Fräulein. I think she must be in her fifties. She has a thin, pinched face. I wonder if Herr Schiller ever offers her his fried cabbage and potato. She looks like a woman who needs feeding up.
At the sound of my voice she looks up and raises her eyebrows, taking in at one glance the yellow dress I’m wearing. No doubt she considers it a sign of western frivolity. She doesn’t approve of Dieter moving to West Berlin and has told me so to my face on a number of previous occasions. Unlike Herr Schiller, she is never friendly. So I am taken aback when her normal stern look dissolves into something approaching a smile.
“Have you heard the news?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say, keen to be on my way before the light times out.
She gives a sigh of satisfaction and nods her head. “Endlich!” she says. At last!
I stare at her in astonishment. It’s well known she is a dedicated member of the Communist Party, but can she really approve of the government splitting the city in half? Her next words leave me in no doubt as to her true feelings.
“At last they are starting to build the Wall between East and West Berlin. Now we will be able to develop our socialist society without interference from over there.” She means the people in West Berlin with their capitalist economy and their valuable Deutschmarks, compared to which our Ostmarks are not worth the paper they’re printed on.
I wouldn’t normally prolong a conversation with Frau Lange, but her comments have riled me.
“But they can’t just split the city in two,” I say. “What about the people who live here? Who have relatives across the border?”
Frau Lange shrugs. “One has to make sacrifices for what one believes in.”
I want to say that I don’t believe in this Communist country, that I don’t think it’s the right way to go, but I bite my tongue, not wishing to provoke an argument.
Frau Lange takes her front door key from her pocket and puts it into the lock. “I too have made sacrifices in the past,” she says. Then she disappears inside and closes the door behind her.
I don’t know what she means and I’m not sure I want to find out. The light times out and I am plunged into darkness. I run my hand over the wall until I find the switch, then hurry down the rest of the stairs before I encounter anyone else.
Outside it’s hot. The sun is high in the sky and I think with bitterness how Brigitta and I should have been bathing in the lake at Wannsee by now. I wonder for a moment about going to see my friend Astrid because she always manages to cheer me up when I’m feeling down, but then I remember she’s away camping, so instead I walk a short distance down Stargarder Strasse until I reach a building similar to my own. From a panel of six buzzers I press the one named Fischer and wait. There’s a crackle then a voice.
“Ja?”
“Hans, ich bin’s.” Hans, it’s me.
The door clicks open, I step into the dark lobby of the apartment building and climb the stairs to the third floor. My oldest friend in the whole world is wait
ing for me.
Dieter
I walk past a busy restaurant on the street corner and the smell of frying Bratwurst suddenly makes me feel hungry. I look at my watch and realise that I’ve been walking in a daze for hours; it’s nearly two o’clock. I head back to the apartment. Everything is as I left it this morning, yet the world has changed. The abandoned picnic hamper is still on the kitchen table. I guess I’ll share the food later with Bernd, but it won’t taste as good. I don’t want to look at it now, a reminder of what today should have been. I put the basket on the floor and turn on the radio. It seems the Americans did finally get through Checkpoint Charlie.
The door opens and Bernd shambles into the kitchen in his pyjamas, his hair sticking up, rubbing his eyes and yawning. Typical.
“Was passiert?” he asks, going to the sink and running himself a glass of water. What’s happening?
He asks that question every morning. It’s not that he has any interest in the outside world, it’s just his way of saying, Hi, how’s it going?
I don’t answer him but just turn up the radio. The announcer is saying that the East Germans started rolling the barbed wire out at half past one in the morning. Half past one in the morning! You have to hand it to them, they’re bloody organised, but that’s what’s so frightening about this. If they can do this, what else can they do?
As Bernd wakes up and takes in what the announcer is saying, all the colour drains from his face. For once the answer to his question, What’s happening? is not Nothing.
Sabine
I’ve known Hans since we were at Kindergarten together, aged six. He’s like another brother to me. On my first day at Kindergarten I clung to Mother’s legs, not wanting her to go. But Hans came over and invited me to play a game with him. I went with him and didn’t notice when Mother left. When she came to collect me later that day, I cried again because I didn’t want to go home.
Ever since Father died, Dieter and I have had to be the strong ones at home. And since Dieter left to go and live in West Berlin that role has fallen increasingly on my shoulders. But with Hans, I don’t have to pretend to be strong. I can be myself with him. He stands in the doorway, regarding me with his bright blue eyes.
“Come here,” he says, taking my hand and leading me into the apartment. His hair is wet as if he has just stepped out of the shower and he smells of fresh soap. I find I’m crying as I tell him about my journey to Friedrichstrasse station this morning.
“We were supposed to be meeting Dieter at the Hauptbahnhof,” I sob, “and then going onto the lake at Wannsee.”
Hans takes me into the living room where his mother, Frau Fischer, is sitting reading today’s copy of Neues Deutschland. A few years older than Mother, Frau Fischer is a good looking woman with well-cut auburn hair who bears her sorrows with patience and fortitude. She keeps the apartment immaculate and it always smells of beeswax. On seeing me enter she puts down the newspaper and takes off her reading glasses, setting them down on a small table in front of two framed photographs; one of Hans taken a couple of months ago on his seventeenth birthday and one of her husband who was killed in Russia during the war. Hans never knew his father.
“Sit down, dear,” says Frau Fischer gesturing to a chair. She doesn’t have to ask me what the matter is. “Would you like some tea?”
I dry my eyes and shake my head. “No, thank you.”
“Actually, you’re lucky to catch me here,” says Hans. “I was about to go out.”
Frau Fischer bites her lip and frowns.
“Where to?” I ask.
Hans makes an impatient gesture with his hands. “Look, we can’t just sit here whilst the government rolls out barbed wire. We need to do something. Take action. The people in West Berlin are protesting. If we take this lying down, they’ll think we want a wall through the middle of Berlin. If we let the authorities get away with this, Berlin will be split for ever.”
That’s just like Hans, to want to fight back. I smile at his fervour.
Frau Fischer looks worried. “You need to be careful Hans. The fact is, some people do want there to be a wall. You don’t want to get yourself into trouble with the Party.” Her eyes flick towards me. She knows what happened to Father when he joined the protests in ‘53. With her own husband dead, Hans is all she has left.
“But don’t you see?” says Hans. “The Communists have acted completely unreasonably. This time the Americans and British will be on our side. They won’t let the East Germans get away with building a wall. But why should they fight on our behalf if we can’t even be bothered to stand up for ourselves?”
I think to myself, that wasn’t Mother’s opinion, but I don’t say anything because I so much want Hans to be right.
“I’ll come with you,” I say, looking up at him. I turn to Frau Fischer. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”
Her face relaxes a little. “All right.”
Once we’re outside Hans sets off towards Alexanderplatz. I walk quickly to keep up. As we head down Prenzlauer Allee I ask Hans how he first heard the news that the border was closed.
“On the radio, of course. I guess you didn’t turn the radio on this morning?”
I shake my head. “Mother was asleep and I didn’t want to wake her.”
He nods his understanding.
When we arrive at Alexanderplatz, it’s unrecognisable from how it was this morning. Back then, which feels like a lifetime ago, the huge concrete square was empty apart from a few people outside the Rotes Rathaus. Now that the news has spread, the square is swarming with people. They have gathered together, as people do at such times – when war breaks out, when peace is announced and when freedoms are taken away. Seeing so many people at Alexanderplatz makes me nervous, knowing what happened here in ’53, so I clutch hold of his arm, something I’ve never done before.
He puts his hand over mine and gives it a squeeze. “Stay close,” he says in my ear. I intend to do just that.
We weave our way towards the centre of the square. There are all sorts of people here: men, women, children. Like the passengers I saw this morning at Friedrichstrasse station, they are disbelieving, angry, confused. Middle-aged women, probably war widows, stand in tight-knit groups talking, clutching handkerchiefs, wringing their hands, pointing towards the west. Maybe they have children or elderly parents over there. There are chants of Freiheit, Freedom, from younger groups. Hans watches them closely and I notice a keen glint in his eyes. It is protesters like that who will be arrested first if the authorities step in, so I try and steer Hans in the opposite direction, mindful of the promise I made to Frau Fischer to keep him safe.
But more and more people are thronging into the square and as the crowd presses in around us I start to feel uneasy. Crowds can be volatile, a single word or action igniting a spark that can turn into an inferno at any moment. People are shouting, angry at the barbed wire that has been rolled out at the border, but after a while I discern other voices in the crowd - not everyone here is opposed to the closure of the border. There are anti-western chants of Imperialism is evil, and Death to the Fascist pigs.
Hans has noticed them too. “Stasi,” he says nodding in the direction of one man who is proclaiming power to the socialist state. “I bet you these people have been planted by the Party.”
At the word Stasi a shiver runs through me. Short for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Ministry of State Security, the Stasi are feared by ordinary people. They do not wear uniforms, so they look like regular citizens, but they keep a close watch over everyone, always on the lookout for any signs of dissent against the Party. They also employ large numbers of unofficial informers, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, known as IMs for short, ordinary people who spy on friends, neighbours, colleagues, even family members, and report back to their controlling officers. Of course no one admits to being an informer, otherwise people would stop speaking to them and then they’d have nothing to report. The whole system relies on secrecy and a wi
llingness amongst some people to betray their friends for the sake of…what? The state? Or is it personal gain? I’ve never been sure.
Maybe it’s just paranoia but suddenly I have the feeling that we’re being watched. I feel overdressed and conspicuous in my yellow dress amongst this crowd of people who are mostly wearing greys and browns, the colours of ordinary life. I look like I’m dressed for a party. I imagine myself identified in a Stasi report – the girl in the yellow dress.
I wish we could leave but it becomes more difficult to move as the crowds increase. I look towards the edge of the square and my heart misses a beat. In front of the Rotes Rathaus, Factory Fighters stand in a line, their feet planted squarely, guns and rifles at the ready.
“Look,” I say pointing towards the Rathaus. “I think we should go.”
But the crowd is surging forward, towards the Fighters, and we are being dragged along with it. There is nothing we can do. Someone must have given a signal because the Fighters start to move, in formation, towards the crowd. Please don’t shoot, I think. If they start firing now there will be a massacre.
By now we are near the front of the crowd. A young man shouts that the barbed wire “is illegal” and “a gross infringement of his liberties.” He is behaving peacefully and his words are thoughtful and articulate, but nevertheless three Factory Fighters immediately move in on him. Two of them take hold of his arms and the third jabs his rifle into the man’s back. The young man struggles in vain to break free as the fighters march him away at gunpoint and shove him into the back of a windowless van. There are a number of such vans parked around the edge of the square. I see lots of hot-headed protesters taken out in this way, mainly young men. I think, they will be locked up and interrogated; the Stasi will have them on file, for ever; their families may never hear of them again. One hears of such stories.
“We should get out of here,” says Hans. I couldn’t agree more.
But just then a new group of protesters surges forward. Either they aren’t aware of what the Factory Fighters are doing or they don’t care. A particularly loud member of the group, an angry man with long hair, shouts at the Factory Fighters, “You’re all stooges of the Communist Party! Cowards! You’re no better than concentration camp guards!” He punches the air with his fist. His companions eagerly join in the shouting. We are standing too close to them. Whilst I share their sentiments, I don’t want to be arrested. Six Factory Fighters start running towards us. If we don’t move now we’ll be arrested along with the whole group. I spot a gap in the crowd and pull Hans towards it. We push our way past dozens of people and suddenly find ourselves on the edge, free of the crowds.
Oranges for Christmas Page 3