The Wessi-Oma went into her little kitchen and came back with a bottle of wine, a glass of juice and a tray of sandwiches.
‘I thought we’d have a little celebration. Out there, they’re certainly going wild.’ She raised her glass. ‘Call me Lilo.’
‘Regine,’ my mother said and raised her glass, too.
‘Call me Ella,’ I said and raised my glass, and the others smiled as if I had said something funny.
We looked outside. West Germans were mingling with the new arrivals. TV crews with big cameras invaded the crowd. People were handing out chocolate and beer. My mother began to cry again. Lilo said she had lived in this flat for twenty years and never thought the day would come. Her Berlin, finally united.
My mother wiped away her tears. ‘You don’t know our government. They’re not going to give in that easily. They’ve got something up their sleeves.’
‘Can I live with you now?’ I asked her.
‘Yes. No.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I don’t know. I think it’s better to wait and see, Ellachen.’
‘Why?’
‘Because – because – because we don’t want them to do anything bad to Oma and Opa, do we? And… to Tobi.’
She fell quiet and I knew she was thinking of Heiko.
Lilo suggested we call home to let everyone know I was safe. Mama shook her head. ‘My mother doesn’t have a telephone anymore. They cut her off after I was arrested.’
The noise outside was swelling. There was music now, the sound of breaking bottles; people were dancing and hugging each other. Mama combed my hair with her fingers again. She never used to do that when we all lived together. It was a little strange, like having a slightly different mother, but it was also nice.
‘I’ll have to take you back,’ she said. ‘We’ll stay here a little bit longer, and then I’ll have to take you back.’
Lilo drew her nightgown around her. ‘I can come with you, if you like. I’m not afraid of them. If they arrest us, there’ll be an international incident.’
‘I think this is an international incident,’ my mother said, and nodded at the crowds outside. She finished her wine. ‘Really, it’s extremely kind of you, but we’ll manage.’
‘One second.’ Lilo disappeared into the kitchen again and came back with a plastic bag stuffed with gifts: chocolate bars, a box of cornflakes, packets of sugar and coffee, a jar of raspberry jam, and, rather strangely, a doily.
‘I made the doily myself!’ She handed me the plastic bag with an expectant smile. I thanked her but felt a bit embarrassed. We had food at home. We did not need to be fed by others. Still, I thought, Tobi would be pleased with the chocolate.
*
My mother looked like a warrior as she moved towards the bridge, hard and heroic, unstoppable. I had never seen her like that and would never see her like that again.
When we approached the border post she slowed and her hand twitched a little. I could not see any guards. Perhaps there were too many people between us and them. She walked me down Bornholmer Straße and all the way to our street. She looked neither left nor right.
When we reached our front door she said: ‘Now slip inside as quietly as you can. Let’s hope they’re still asleep. And tomorrow when they ask you, say… actually, tell them the truth. Tell them what you did. And tell them that I send my love, and that I hope to see them very soon, tomorrow if possible. Ask Oma to take you over if the border is still open; and if she absolutely refuses to, ask Opa Horst.’
‘Don’t you want to come in and say hello?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t go into that building. I can’t even be in this street. I’m done with this country. Go in there now, my love.’
She watched me open the door, then turned around and ran the other way, as if chased by dogs.
32
AFTER THAT NIGHT, EVERYTHING changed once again. Tobi and I went to see our mother together. Opa Horst took us to West Berlin the next day. He even collected his welcome money from a West German bank and queued with us for hamburgers at McDonald’s, which were free if you showed your East German passport; and he bought us two cans of Coca-Cola as well.
The drink was not all that special, just sweet fizzy water really, though there was something pleasantly dark to the taste, like burnt caramel. The hamburger looked more or less like a normal Berliner patty in a bun. But after my first bite I decided it was quite different from a normal patty and actually very good, dense and savoury with a sweetness from the tomato ketchup. When I reached the gherkin in the middle, my tongue flinched at the sudden floppy sourness. I did not want to upset Opa and ate my way through it without making a fuss. Then I looked up and saw Opa’s nose crinkle, and I knew he too had reached the gherkin. Like me, he bravely chewed his way past it.
‘Igitt!’ Tobi shouted. He opened his mouth and spat a green mess into his hand. Opa scolded him, worried that the workers at McDonald’s would think us ungrateful.
‘You didn’t like it either,’ I said to Opa.
‘But I didn’t spit it out.’ He put his arms around us. ‘Now remember what we said about the hamburgers. Not a word to Oma.’
*
My mother took us to the KaDeWe, the Kaufhaus des Westens, and bought clothes for us, bags and bags of well-fitting clothes. I could not believe how many things there were: how many lipsticks in how many colours, how many perfumes, shoes, toys. All around us were East Germans shopping with their welcome money from the West German government. Later, Oma said that was the Wessis’ way of speeding up the takeover: get our people hooked on baubles and trinkets. ‘Glass beads’, she called the gifts. ‘Look how they’re coming over with their glass beads, ready to take our land.’
The pavements in Prenzlauer Berg filled up with old toys: hand-sewn rag dolls, rocking horses made from chairs, little trains carved from wood. No one wanted this old rubbish any more. New toys sat proudly on shelves and beds: Barbie dolls, superheroes, colourful plastic trains.
Children’s books and board games piled up on the pavements, too. Erika the Electrician; Come, Let’s Build a Children’s Home; Kolya the Brave Soldier. The book that had taught me to read and write, Our Spelling Book, was reissued as My Spelling Book. Gone were the old illustrations, the flags of our Brother Countries, the tanks and guns. Gone was the story of Soldier Heinz and his sister Helga.
We had been taught badly, it emerged; we had been taught to think too much of the group and too little of the individual person, and there was a sudden effort to rectify that mistake with these new books. It was remarkable how swiftly that change took place, how swiftly guns were turned into flowers, and soldiers into little girls with pigtails. And just as swiftly, the new books in our schools also became obsolete. My Spelling Book lasted less than a year. Oma had been right, our country was not just being reformed. It was not just a question of changing a few words and pictures in our books – no, the whole country was deemed such a complete failure that it was better to scrap it altogether.
The German Democratic Republic vanished, and we became part of West Germany, of the Federal Republic, which was the only Germany now.
Oma and her comrades were not the only ones who struggled with this. The dogs in our neighbourhood were terribly, terribly confused by the change in their territory. Their masters now wanted to go over to the Mauerpark, stroll about in Wedding, expand their range a little. Occasionally they might forget for a moment that a street that had been shut off was now open, that a new shortcut could take you straight across where before you had to make a detour. We all took a little time to adjust to that, to redraw our mental maps, but eventually most of us did. The dogs, however, respected where the old division had been. I once spotted Frau Pietsch trying to tug her little yapper down a street, and he dug his claws in and absolutely refused. ‘Komm,’ she called out, ‘komm, komm!’ No use. He would not go left where he had always gone right. She gave in and let him continue along his familiar route a safe distance from the phantom wall.
&nb
sp; Speaking of Frau Pietsch – the neighbours and friends who had discreetly shunned us after my father’s death, who had pretended not to see me in the queue, who had stopped ringing the doorbell to ask for salt or butter – those people now told me how sorry they had felt for us, and how in their hearts they had always been on our side.
‘There were some who talked very badly about your family,’ perky Frau Minsky said to me one day, in her tight skirt and blouse, her bottom sticking out. ‘But I always stood up for you.’
She straightened her blouse with fussy righteousness and gave me an expectant look, waiting for me to thank her, perhaps, or tell her that she was a good person. I did not know what to say and stared at her, wordless, until she said she’d better go and check how her roast chicken was coming along, Herr Minsky was very particular about his dinner.
The only one who continued as before was Frau Rachmann, the revered translator. She shuffled down the pavement in her soiled nightie, oblivious to the crates of Coca-Cola and the big Mercedes cars. Did not care at all. Was gently rounded up and led back to her flat. Smiled at me. Smiled at the sky. Did not care at all.
*
For the first few days, Mama burst into tears every time she looked at us. She could not believe how much we had grown. She remained a little shy with us in the months that followed, was reluctant to tell us off, seemed uncertain of our needs and habits. We moved out of Prenzlauer Berg and into her tiny flat in Wedding. She had been unable to find a job at a university and was working as a cleaner. Once we began living with her, we noticed her strange aversions, her tremors, her fear of small closed rooms, of loud male voices, of basements.
*
Oma caved in and came over to West Berlin, because my mother absolutely refused to go to Prenzlauer Berg. Their reunion was not without its complications. Oma immediately tried to tell my mother that she should find a better job, that surely the West German government would help her.
‘The Wessis already splashed out fifty thousand Deutschmarks on me,’ my mother said. ‘I was a top East German export, right? So I don’t think I can hope for much more from them. I don’t think they want to throw even more money down this particular drain.’
‘There’s no need to bring up the past,’ my grandmother retorted, as if she had not been the one who started it.
I went to a school in Wedding, and met Turkish children for the first time in my life. Everyone seemed to recognise me as an Ossi, even in my Western clothes. I was better at sports than most of the other children, even though I had been considered absolutely hopeless back home, and that, I suppose, was the only thing that saved me from being mercilessly bullied.
Slowly I eased into this new life, this life where my mother was a cleaner and my father had died in a tragic accident. And then, just after reunification, Mama sat us down and said she had some good news. A famous institute of art history, part of a big university in London, had set up a fellowship for East German academics. She had applied, and for once, her time in prison had actually counted in her favour. They liked dissidents over there. They had even offered additional support so she could take the two of us along.
‘What about Heiko?’ I asked.
‘It’s difficult,’ my mother said. ‘I’m doing all I can to find him. But I don’t think being stuck here as a cleaner helps. I think if I had a more prestigious job, if I made a name for myself again, maybe even internationally, it would be easier.’
What had happened, she explained, was that the two Germanies had negotiated a contract for their reunification. The four victors of the Second World War – France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States – were part of those negotiations. The talks were about the big things, about the borders of the reunified Germany, about the weapons it was allowed to have, about the withdrawal of the Soviet troops. But smaller things, like the status of very small children who were taken away from their parents by the state – those things had not been negotiated.
As it stood, no one was obliged to return Heiko to us.
Even worse, it was likely that he had been adopted by another family. Their claim would now stand against ours, and theirs would win, because we had no right to get him back; no East German dissidents had the right to get their children back. The adoptions had been lawful under East German law, and therefore remained valid.
And anyway, who would listen to my mother now? Who cared about the opinion of a woman whose last major published work examined the role of the Expressionists in the history of Class Struggle? She was a single mother, a cleaning lady; her books on art were as obsolete as Our Spelling Book. She had no legal right to Heiko, and the only other way to exert pressure was through opinion pieces and newspaper articles, through petitions and books. That avenue was not promising now, because she was a nobody. However, if she managed to climb back to some sort of status in this new world, if she won the backing of a renowned foreign university for example – well, maybe that would help.
‘How would you feel about moving to London?’ my mother asked.
I did not know what to say. She had never consulted me on any important decisions before. I felt a new sense of responsibility, of maturity.
My instinct was of course to stay, because then we would be closer to Heiko. But when I thought about it, I realised I did not even know where Heiko was. He might be anywhere in East Germany – he might be tucked away right by the Polish border for all I knew. He might have been adopted by Russians: that happened – no one was supposed to talk about it but it happened. Being close or not close was not the question. The question was how we could get him back. And I had already noticed that in West Berlin as in East Berlin, it helped if you had an impressive title and an impressive job.
Still, I asked: ‘Can you really not get a job in Berlin?’
I was thinking of Oma and Opa, and how much I would miss them.
‘It’s not just that, Ella. I never feel quite comfortable here. I always have this sense of confinement, this fear that I’ll wake up in the morning and they’ll have put the wall back up. My health isn’t what it used to be, and it’s getting worse. I don’t think I’ll get any better if we stay in Berlin. Everything here reminds me of your father, everything reminds me of Heiko, everything reminds me of the past. I shouldn’t burden you with this, but that’s how it is.’
I nodded. I did understand.
‘Do you think you’ll feel better in London?’ I asked.
She thought about it for a while. ‘Well, I’ve never lived anywhere but Germany, so I don’t really know. We’d all have to learn English, and for me that would be harder than for you and Tobi, because I’m older.’ Something stopped her. She thought again, and continued: ‘Yes, I think you and Tobi would become English very quickly.’
‘But not too English,’ I said anxiously, aware that Heiko, wherever he was, would remain German.
‘Not too English,’ she agreed. ‘But to answer your question – it’ll be an adventure. I can’t promise that it’ll turn out right. We may not like it in London. The thing is, the only way to find out is to go there. And who knows, we may like it so much that we’ll stay there forever.’
‘And Heiko will join us?’
‘Of course he will. It’s all so chaotic now, but it won’t stay like this. We’ll just keep fighting and eventually they’ll have to return all the children. You’ll see, we’ll get him back sooner than you think.’
‘Then we should go,’ I said. And I wondered what life in London was going to be like – where we would live, what we would eat, and how it would feel to speak in a different language and become a different person, an English girl.
33
Aaron
Berlin 2010
IT WAS THE LAST day of Aaron’s internship. Bernd had brought in sparkling Sekt and Bretzeln. The other interns gathered around his desk and congratulated him on his work on the office evacuations and the metal workers. Several staff researchers had already shown an interest in the metal workers in particul
ar, as part of an ongoing project on informal industrial action in the GDR.
Bernd had a new project, too – a big exhibition about artists and surveillance.
‘It’s going to be great,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a videographer and everything, interviews, films, paintings, archive stuff. Stasi and the Art World – that’s just the working title. We’ll think of something sexier, a bit more creative. Framed: Artists in the Eyes of the Stasi. That’s pretty good, isn’t it? Self-portrait with Interrogator. Something like that.’
Aaron reached for another Bretzel. ‘Confession with Blue Horses?’
‘I like it! Why the blue horses though?’
‘I don’t know. It just popped into my head. Forget about it.’
‘No, I really do like it. I’ll check if any of the GDR’s artists painted blue horses. It could work.’
Bernd typed the title into his phone. Later he gave a little farewell speech that summarised Aaron’s achievements in verse.
Dr Licht gave a speech, too.
‘The ancient Greeks,’ Licht said in his ponderous way, ‘believed that before crossing over into the next life, the dead souls had to drink from the Lethe, the river of oblivion, which runs through the underworld. Without forgetting about their past lives, they could not step into their new ones. But here, we don’t drink from the Lethe, we refuse to even go near it. We’ve sworn allegiance to its opposite, to a-letheia, aletheia – un-forgetfulness – which is the Greek word for truth. Truth is the opposite of oblivion and the opposite of concealment. It’s a state in which everything is known, everything is remembered, everything is brought to light and laid out in the open, and that’s the state of being we aspire to here. To aletheia!’
‘To aletheia!’ Everyone raised their glasses.
How pleasant the dark gentle waters of the Lethe must feel, Aaron thought. Step in, let the water cool your sagging skin, let it wash away all your mistakes, all your regrets, all the accumulated failures of your little life. It was a wonderful vision, much more inviting than the cold, bright, brutal light of aletheia. There was a softness to the act of forgetting, a gentleness. Still, he raised his glass along with the others and thanked Licht for his trust and support.
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