An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

  ‘What’s happening?’ Petra shouted, but the man didn’t answer. He dropped down and pushed his face to the concrete like he was eavesdropping. When he jumped up again, he kept his head over.

  ‘Careful, Uwe!’ someone shouted.

  He swung his leg up and mounted the Wall side-on, as if he was riding a horse.

  ‘They’re not shooting,’ said someone in the crowd. The air filled with camera flashes as the man got to his knees. A van pulled up and the door swung open. A news crew emptied out of it and they trained their bright lights on the man.

  ‘Uwe,’ cried his friend from below, reaching up to him. Uwe pulled him up. Other men and women ran to the Wall, shouting and jabbering, their shoes scraping at the graffitied concrete as they scrambled up. When they mounted the Wall they raised their hands in the air and howled like dogs. Below, others kicked at the Wall, someone produced a hammer and started to hit it, eliciting a high clink, clink, clink. The four of us stood gawping. We didn’t know what to do.

  I heard official voices talking through loudspeakers, but the sound was drowned out by the people on the Wall whistling so loudly that it sounded like the screaming whistles of fireworks at New Year’s. Then a jet of water from a cannon on the Eastern side hit Uwe’s friend from behind, and he tumbled off the Wall to the ground. A crowd surrounded him and he was helped up, dizzy but unhurt.

  The jet of water moved along the Wall and others, now ready for it, jumped free, or dropped to their knees and gripped the Wall when the water hit. When it turned on Uwe, he stumbled but then regained his footing. Slowly he raised his arms, and in the white glare of the floodlights and camera lights, the water sprayed into the air as if it was emanating from him, and then fell down around us all like silver rain. He screamed and we responded by screaming back, whistling and singing, dancing in the falling water as it made puddles on the ground at our feet.

  The water cut out and we ran at the Wall. Someone handed me schnapps; I swigged from it and passed it on.

  ‘Let’s go to the Gate,’ I said. ‘I want to see.’

  Petra protested, but Stefan took her hand and I took Maike’s and we ran together across the park. When we reached the part of the Wall by Brandenburger Tor we sprang up into the sea of hands waiting for us. Stefan was up first and on his feet, screaming. Then I found my footing and, holding on to the crowds either side of me, afraid to fall, I looked into the West at the crowds gathered there, at the cameras and flashes, and saw Oz. He was standing at the edge of the Tiergarten, beneath the bare trees, watching me. I slowly raised my hand to wave. He raised his in return, smiling, benevolent and ghostlike.

  I bent my knees to climb down from the Wall, to run to him, but a little shove caused me to shift my foot and put my weight on nothing and I fell awkwardly backwards, hitting my coccyx on the concrete, sliding off the Wall into the East, where I was half caught by other men and women clamouring to get up.

  ‘Ralf!’ Stefan shouted.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I called back, but I’d landed badly on my ankle and when I tried to get up again, I fell. ‘It’s fine,’ I shouted again when Stefan threatened to come down. ‘Just get Oz!’ I cried. ‘Tell him I’m coming!’

  From the top of the Wall, Stefan cupped a hand round his ear.

  ‘Oz!’ I shouted, but he shook his head.

  ‘I can’t hear you!’ he mouthed.

  I tried to stand and a pain shot up into my calf. I cried out. A middle-aged woman put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Wait, wait. If it’s broken, you’ll make it worse.’

  ‘It’s not broken,’ I said, trying to stand and falling again. ‘Fuck!’ I shouted.

  ‘Just give it a second, junger Mann,’ she said, holding me down.

  I nodded, a tear wetting my face, and waited for the pain to subside, terrified that Oz was going to disappear, thinking I hadn’t gone back for him.

  Someone shouted, ‘Monsters!’

  I was in the death strip. I thought it would be a mess of deadly barbed wire and broken glass, but it was pristine. The ground was clear, like a car park, with inhumanly tall floodlights towering above. Beyond the flattened ground was a neat watchtower and beyond that curled barbed wire lit white, like crazed chalk-drawn loops, and then the second wall in the East. It was eerily quiet, the screams, whistles and song muffled by the high concrete, and the band of men and women standing on top of the Wall with their backs to me, shouting to the crowds in the West.

  I looked at the back of the Wall that had encircled me my whole life and was shocked to see the concrete beautiful in its ungraffitied clarity. On top, the crowd, lit by film cameras and police lights, were silhouetted in front of the pale smoke of their own breath. Around me East German men and women silently clambered onto milk crates and were lifted or pulled up. A few stood triumphant on the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier; most disappeared over it, not looking back.

  ‘Monsters!’ I heard again, and saw in the dark a middle-aged woman, with frizzled hair and gnomey features. ‘You monsters!’ A shifting barrier of border guards stood with their hands behind their backs and said nothing. ‘Don’t you understand what you’ve done? You’ll never be forgiven,’ she said. ‘Never.’

  I eased myself up; the pain had subsided a little. ‘Lie down,’ the middle-aged woman said.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go. There’s someone waiting for me.’

  ‘Ralf!’ I heard. It was Stefan draped over the Wall, holding out his hands. I limped over to him and scrambled up. The Wall smelt of wet concrete and I felt Stefan’s arms on my arms, and strangers’ hands helping me down to the ground on the Western side. Around me, East Germans slid down the Wall like raindrops, whole families, their children hastily dressed and sleepy, tearlessly going through the long-dreamed-of motions of escape.

  I hobbled into the Tiergarten, to the place where I’d seen Oz, but he was gone and the park was full of revellers and lovers, drinking, crying and kissing.

  I shouted his name into the dark – ‘Oz!’ – and people, thinking I was shouting ‘Ost’ – East – shouted it back to me in celebration. ‘Ost!’ they cried ‘Ost!’ I turned to look for my friends but we’d been separated, so I wandered into the Tiergarten calling Oz’s name in the gathering dark until my voice was hoarse and the revellers were distant and forgotten.

  Forty-One

  At some point that night a bottle of prosecco was pushed into my hand and I wandered the city searching for Oz among the dizzy crowds thronging about the crumbling Wall. As the sky began to brighten, I headed back to our apartment, hoping that he had gone to Windscheidstraße to find me. I was also very drunk and tired and wanted to fall asleep in my own bed and, after everything, I still wanted to make my mother happy. I knew there would be a reckoning with my father, but watching East Berliners stream over the Wall I knew that nothing that he or I had done mattered any more. I knew that we had all been freed.

  I unlocked the door to our apartment and went inside. A strip of pale morning sunlight slanted across the parquet and I stood staring at it, feeling the world open up around me.

  ‘Hello?’ I said. They must have heard the news, and if they hadn’t it was important enough that I could wake them up and tell them. I walked through into the living room and was confronted by my family arranged as if for a society portrait. Dad sat forward in an armchair, his hands clasped together around his car keys, his trousers pulled up revealing his long red socks. Mum sat on the arm of the chair with one leg crossed over the other, wearing her trench coat over a long cornflower-blue skirt that I’d never seen before. She was staring out of the window, the pale light making her eyes impossibly green, like spring moss. Martin sat in front of them on the floor like a child, with his rucksack on, staring at his knees.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘Did you see the news?’

  ‘We have to leave,’ Dad said.

  These words grounded me. Martin and Mum stood up.

  ‘What am I meant to do?’ I said, my skin cold and my mouth
dry.

  ‘You’re coming too, of course,’ Mum said, and fished her arm around my head, pulling it into the crook of her neck so that she could kiss my forehead.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said.

  ‘East,’ Dad said.

  ‘The Wall’s coming down,’ I heard Martin saying.

  ‘We’ve told Martin everything,’ Mum said. ‘They’ve broken into the Stasi’s offices, Ralf, and it’ll only be a matter of time before information starts leaking out.’

  ‘We need to be bold, Ralf,’ Dad said. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘I’ve packed some things for you,’ said Mum. ‘You’ve got a couple of minutes to check it and then we’ll head off. The car’s packed.’

  I felt suddenly very sober. ‘I need to stay here,’ I said. ‘I saw Oz.’

  ‘Ralf, you’re drunk. He’s gone. That’s over,’ said Dad.

  Dizzy and confused, I went into my room, where I found a suitcase on my bed. Without looking inside I closed it and carried it out into the hall. I wanted to be with them for one last car journey, knowing that it would be the end of our old lives, the funeral procession for our eighteen years together in Windscheidstraße 53. I wasn’t afraid. I knew that Dad was fooling himself about the resilience of the GDR. When I got out of the car just before the border I would soon see them again, crossing easily into East Berlin through an unmanned checkpoint.

  Despite this I couldn’t help trying to convince him to abandon our flight. ‘Dad, this doesn’t make sense,’ I said as the car rumbled over the cobbles of our street, ‘there isn’t any East any more. Or there won’t be soon. Why don’t we just wait it out?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is the end of the Wall, not the end of East Germany. It’s a chance. There’s a chance for a new more open socialism. It might be our best chance to really make a difference there. As a family.’

  ‘But Dad, you—’ I started, exasperated by his naivety, but my mother reached round the seat and squeezed my leg, telling me in that waxing and waning pressure to stop talking, that Dad needed to carry out his escape plan even if it would be rendered meaningless within a few months as East Germany slowly sank to its knees.

  I sat back in my seat and stared at my father’s desperate eyes as we immediately got tangled up in the crowds. I turned to the stunned faces passing the car’s windows and Mum said, ‘We shouldn’t have come down Yorckstraße. God, how stupid.’

  ‘Be quiet, Pat,’ Dad snapped. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  I stared at his red face. I’d never seen him this angry or afraid. Who was he? I thought. Who were we? Traitors, emigrants, West German, East German, British? We were all of these things and none of them, of course. And the trouble was that our history of lies was the only true and stable thing I’d known, however corrupt it was. But it was corrupt, and that was why I kept fingering the door handle, getting ready to leave the moment I felt our final journey had been fully played out.

  The buzzing moan of the car’s engine fan grew louder and louder as we crawled along in a snake of cars, the beeping horns fighting the cheers of the crowd. The pavement and the road were covered in food wrappers, the mashed orange paper of fireworks and the broken glass of Sekt bottles and beer bottles. People squeezed around us, East Germans streaming down the streets, standing in serpentine queues in front of banks, West Germans pushing towards the crumbling holes that appeared in the Wall. A drunk teenager in a leather jacket wearing a plastic red nose slapped the bonnet of the car and whooped.

  The traffic loosened on Mehringdamm and we crossed the bridge at Hallesches Tor. I began to feel eerily calm. The last lies had been told. And however frightening the future might be, it would occur in that penetrating winter light that exposes every freckle of your face, picks out every grey hair and fleck of loose skin.

  There was a small traffic jam at Checkpoint Charlie. I saw the half-kilometre of traffic in front of us and thought, this is the stretch of time I have to think about my old life and my new life, but I didn’t know what to think about any of it. When I forced myself to consider my existence to date, all that emerged were odd snapshots: the bright playing field at my primary school, the synthetic feel of my grey school trousers, the smoothness of the knots in my pine headboard when I touched them in the dark feeling anxious about nuclear bombs as I fell asleep. My friends Petra, Stefan and Maike at the lakeside, the sound of them sleeping around me by the telescopes at the observatory on the hill. My family gathered around the television, the feeling of our grey carpet beneath my bare feet. Was that all I had of them? My family watching television, and this: four terrified people in an Opel Astra?

  Someone knocked at Dad’s window. The swathes of revellers that had already bumped into the car meant that none of us looked up, until a second knock came, more officious, and a voice muffled by the glass said, ‘Can you turn off here please?’

  Dad wound down his window. ‘What’s going on?’ he said.

  The man bent down to make himself heard. He had greying hair greased into a side parting and when he said, ‘Can you turn off here please and pull in behind my colleague?’ I heard that he had a Bavarian accent. He fixed me with ice-blue eyes and gave me a brief nod.

  We looked into Hedemannstraße and saw a police car with a policewoman standing beside its open door, signalling to them.

  ‘We’re going East,’ Dad said. ‘I thought we didn’t need papers any more.’

  ‘We just want to take a look,’ Mum said, crouching to see the man’s face. ‘We just want to look around.’

  ‘Just turn off here,’ the man said. ‘Just pull in behind my colleague, please.’

  Dad wound up the window. His forehead was covered in sweat and I could smell the damp wool of his sports jacket. He looked at the police car and then at the border. The only way he could reach it without being stopped would be to mount the pavement, but it was filled with people. The car jolted forward and for a moment I went cold, thinking he was doing it, that we were going to bump over the kerb and ride over the bodies to freedom. But he jerked the wheel round and parked behind the police car just as he’d been told to.

  He turned to Martin and me. His frown dissolved and he smiled at us. ‘Jungs,’ he said, and his damp grey eyes searched our faces, trying to take in every detail.

  The policewoman signalled to Mum and distantly we heard her say, ‘Could you both step out of the car please.’

  Martin and I watched them climb out. ‘We’ll just be a moment,’ Mum said.

  I clambered forward into the passenger seat, the leather still warm from where she’d been sitting. The policeman opened the rear doors of the police car and Mum and Dad got in. I watched the backs of their heads and listened to the ticking of the car’s cooling engine. The Bavarian got into the passenger seat and turned to talk to them.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said.

  ‘They’re being arrested,’ said Martin.

  I turned round and held on to the back of the seat. Martin was grey, the colour he went when he was about to be carsick.

  ‘It’s going to be fine,’ I lied. ‘They’re probably just doing random checks. I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

  He shook his head. ‘They’re being arrested.’ Tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘I called the police.’ His shoulders shook and he looked down at his lap.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘When?’

  ‘They were arguing about going. And they sat me down and explained why we had to go, what they’d been doing. What could I do, Ralf?’ he said desperately. ‘They were spies. They’re East German spies.’

  ‘They’re our parents.’

  ‘What about my GCSEs? And Cologne?’

  ‘Cologne?’

  ‘With the football team,’ he said. ‘The tournament. I can’t just leave the team.’

  ‘The school football team?’

  ‘I was scared,’ said Martin. ‘I was scared I didn’t know who they really were and you weren’t there. And they were going to take us to Moscow.’

  ‘Fuck,�
�� I said, and pushed through the gap between the seats to sit next to him. He put his head onto my shoulder and sobbed. I rocked him as his moans filled the car. He only stopped when the police came. Then we sat in the back of the police car, Martin taking shuddering breaths as the crowds parted in front of us, and were driven home without our parents.

  Forty-Two

  Auntie Linda didn’t look like our mother, except for her skin, which had the same pattern of heavy freckles, surging up her neck and over her face. She wore leggings, lumpy polo necks in beiges and browns, and large red-framed glasses that gave her an owlish look. Her hair was brown too, and permed. She was calm and quiet with a girlish English voice, but had a habit, when she was thinking, of sticking her hand into the tight curls of her long hair and pushing it dramatically away from her face, as if she had suddenly remembered some terrible error she’d made: leaving the gas on at home or all of the windows open. It reminded me of Oz.

  I sat on the kitchen windowsill watching my aunt in this pose, the fingers of one hand in her hair, a wooden spatula in the other.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Ralf!’ my aunt said. ‘I don’t know where it goes.’

  ‘The second drawer down,’ I said. ‘By the dishwasher.’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t want Pat to come back and find everything in the wrong place.’

  I wasn’t sure why she kept talking about Mum coming back. We hadn’t been given any indication that she would be coming back any time soon. Perhaps it was meant to comfort us. It didn’t comfort me.

  Auntie Linda was a much better cook than Mum, and the house smelled of richly seasoned meat simmering in the oven. She seemed to do all her cooking in the oven, making pies and bakes and savoury tarts, giving them what appeared to me and Martin to be made-up names and being constantly surprised that we’d never heard of them.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Martin would say. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s toad-in-the-hole, Martin,’ she’d say, bemused. ‘What else could it be?’