The Sword of Heaven

by Mikkel Aaland

  I pulled back my arm to toss the Shinto god into the lake. From the back of my throat two words formed: Thor! Odin! As my arm snapped forward, the words sprang from my lips and flew with the god as it sailed through the air. Both the god and my words traveled much farther than I expected.

  Two more birds flew overhead and playfully darted back and forth across the lake. Uninhibited from the wine, I waved my hands in the air, imagining I was one of them.

  “Well, look who has arrived,” I cried. “There’s Juan, the older brother! And Kazz, the inscrutable!”

  I started waving my hands again. “Welcome to the meeting place of the gods! Welcome!”

  We danced together, the three of us. We were gods! We danced to a score conceived and conducted by a wise old man who claimed to be an instrument of God himself.

  We danced for the world. We danced for ourselves. We pounded our feet on the ground until the earth shook. We cried to the heavens, to our fellow gods. We laughed. Nothing was serious, except our pleasure. For a few glorious moments, I forgot that Kazz was the mysterious East, I the rational West, and Juan, well, Juan with his Cuban and Chinese blood was the cool middle man. I forgot all our differences and danced madly with them as brothers.

  “Old man,” I thought as I finally stopped and focused blurry-eyed across the lake. “You are as confusing as hell, but your music is beautiful, and it is a wonderful night in Iceland!”

  On the way back to my room, I patted the landlady’s sheep dog’s head as he bounded up to greet me. I crawled into bed and fell asleep immediately. I woke just past midnight—my throat dry, my head aching, and my right arm sore from throwing the heavy stone. What had gotten into me? Dancing drunk on the shore like that. Thinking I was a god? The resolve to finish the project I had felt in New York dimmed like the evening sky, and I wondered what the hell I was doing spending so much time and money to toss a stone into a lake, so far from home.

  “Get a real job,” I scolded myself. “Get a life. Settle in the country, have a family , and plant trees.”

  My negativity passed, and I heard the cries of the three birds again as I fell asleep.

  chapter 15

  My German friend Wolfgang at the Berlin Wall.

  “It’ll be a cold winter.”

  —President Kennedy in 1961 when Soviet Premier Khrushchev threatened nuclear war over Berlin

  Soon after I returned from Iceland, Donna and I got into a serious argument. Our sublet was nearly up. I was disgusted with the violence and intensity of the building and the neighborhood, and I told her that I wanted to go back to San Francisco, where I could make some money and get some rest. She wanted to stay in New York and pursue her career. We came to an uneasy compromise. She’d find another place, in a safer neighborhood, and I would return to San Francisco, fatten my bank account, and then come back to New York. In the meantime we’d maintain a bicoastal relationship.

  After New York, San Francisco seemed like a village. Strangers were friendly. Taxi drivers were polite. “It’s almost too nice,” I said to Donna on the phone after a week. “I’m getting nervous. The other day, when I was swimming at the pool, this guy got in my way and I laid into him. Told him what I thought. He just crumbled and looked at me like I was crazy.”

  “Marshmallows,” said Donna.

  “Yeah, but you know, it’s so nice to be able to sleep at night without someone trying to break in.”

  The summer passed. Donna flew out to the West Coast to see me. I flew to New York to see her. In the meantime, I tried to hustle assignments that would take me to places that lacked a Shinto god.

  In the fall, Diversion magazine assigned me to write an article on Helsinki. Gods had already been placed in Finland, according to Kazz, but none in the Baltic Sea. Also, he said in answer to my query, none had been placed in Berlin.

  In the late afternoon of October 21, 1986, my old friend Wolfgang met me at the Hamburg train station. Finnair had flown me as their guest from Seattle to Helsinki and then on to Copenhagen. There I boarded a train bound for West Germany. Wolfgang had parked illegally, and we hurried to his car, a 1967 Mercedes station wagon. He pushed boxes full of his movie equipment and film aside and tossed my luggage, including two gods, into the backseat. The rain was relentless and the rush-hour traffic overwhelming. Nonetheless, we decided to leave immediately for Berlin and eat later.

  “How’s Donna?” he asked after successfully navigating us out of the congested city. He’d met her a couple times, once in San Francisco and once in New York.

  “She’s fine. She loves New York, which is a problem.”

  Wolfgang nodded.

  “It’s a great city,” I quickly added, “but difficult.”

  “I know. But you are in San Francisco now, right?”

  “I’ve been flying back and forth.”

  “Will you move back to New York?”

  “That’s the plan,” I said with false enthusiasm, “as soon as I can.” In fact, the very thought of living in New York again depressed me. But if I didn’t return, what would happen to Donna and me? And what about the Shinto project? It was getting harder and harder to juggle the project, the relationship, and the rest of my life.

  “Why are you here, in Europe?” Wolfgang asked after a pause, unaware of my internal conflict. “Why Berlin?”

  I explained that I was on assignment but that I was interested in Berlin because of the Shinto peace project. Like all my close friends, he already knew about my involvement. I had been at his flat in Munich when I received my first letter from Kazz four years earlier. Wolfgang didn’t really understand why I was putting so much effort into something so strange, but he sensed how important it was to me.

  “You don’t mind helping, do you? You always wanted to show me Berlin,” I asked.

  “It’s just good to see you,” he said.

  A few hours from Hamburg, we stopped near the border between West and East Germany.

  “We’re only a few hours from Berlin,” Wolfgang explained, “but we have to pass through East Germany. Once we’re in East Germany, we can’t really stop or get off the autobahn.”

  We filled the car with gas. At an ultramodern roadside café with brightly colored tables, we ordered chicken soup. The broth was rich, bursting with flavor. Wolfgang promised more food in Berlin, so we ate quickly and then jumped into the Mercedes to drive the short distance to the border control station. There a guard just glanced at Wolfgang’s passport and stamped my American passport with an East German transit visa.

  The long autumn sunset was turning dark as we drove deeper into the east. The well-lit billboards which had lined the highway from Hamburg disappeared. There were few road lights, and few signs of life beyond the crowded Trabants that moved slowly along the road. Wolfgang’s twenty-year-old car roared past the miniature two-cycle East German automobiles.

  Surrounded by all of this, our mood changed. It was as if the bleak scene outside were an unwanted guest sitting between us and casting darkness and gloom over us. I pulled my tape recorder from my bag and mocked a radio interview, trying for comic relief.

  “Sitting next to me is a man by the name of Wolfgang Ettlich. It’s exactly ten minutes to six. We are in East Germany en route to West Berlin. Ah, a sign! It says: Berlin: der Haupstadt der DDR 159 km. This man next to me—a very unusual German man, I might add, with a good sense of humor—was born in Berlin.”

  “That’s right,” Wolfgang said, answering me in English and getting into my playful game. “In 1947.”

  “That’s him laughing there next to me. And in a minute we are going to ask him a few more questions. We want to know how he feels about going back to this lovely city in the middle of nowhere and...”

  “Middle of nowhere?” he interrupted with mock indignation. “We’re in the middle of the Cold War! Look! There is an enemy tank! No, I am wrong. It is just a truck. There is a nuclear warhead! No, it’s just a farmhouse. But, there, that surely is the enemy on a dangerous mission.” He laugh
ed and then pointed to our left, where a dimly lit Trabant had turned off the main road and was headed out into the dark countryside.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “So tell me what it was like growing up here in the middle of the not-so-visible enemy.”

  Wolfgang launched into a not-so-silly monologue about his life growing up in an ugly apartment surrounded by bombed-out buildings whose rubble prevented the children from playing anywhere but in the tiny backyard. He lived in Berlin’s American-controlled section, and he vowed to go to America one day. When he finally did, he said, “The first thing they did in Times Square was rip me off.”

  A huge Mercedes truck, covered snugly with a blue tarp, roared passed us. I was suddenly curious about Wolfgang’s father. The tape recorder made me bold.

  “What did your father do during the war?”

  “He was a mechanic. What about yours?”

  For a moment I hesitated. My father had made illegal radios in Norway during World War II, and if the occupying German forces had found him out he would have been shot. Radios were lifelines to the outside world, and the Nazis wanted to cut the Norwegians off from all news except Nazi propaganda. When I told Wolfgang, he just nodded.

  It was a chilling thought that our two fathers had once been at least technically enemies, but as we continued through the epicenter of the Cold War battleground, I envied them. Theirs was a tangible war. Carry a radio, or radio component, or break a rule and you were dead. Shot. Just like that. Wolfgang’s and my war was full of ambiguities. It wasn’t even a war. It was a “cold war,” a war mostly in the minds of cool, calculating leaders. The actual fighting happened in proxy countries: in Central America, in Southeast Asia, and in Africa, but always with the same vagueness and ambiguity of purpose. Even the radiation that ultimately could kill all the Cold War participants was invisible. It killed slowly, horribly.

  Wolfgang interrupted my thoughts, “Your father still work at the Lab?”

  “He retired a few years ago,” I said.

  Ahead of us was a caravan of stopped trucks, with emergency lights flashing. Wolfgang gripped the steering wheel tighter and slowed the car.

  Of course, my father had also experienced fear. He often told me that he had never been so scared as he was during World War II. It was fear, I’m sure, that drove him to work for the Lab, or at least gave him the justification for working there. He imagined he was helping ensure that nothing like the Nazi regime would ever happen again. It was fear that prompted him to build the bomb shelter. “The best offense,” he would recite, “is a good defense.”

  But in this crazy modern world, his rational objective defenses didn’t work. Bomb shelters, which were effective during earlier wars, seemed ultimately senseless in the face of a nuclear explosion. Ours became merely a backdrop for my childhood nightmares.

  Even my father agreed that Star Wars—the ultimate rational defense—was a crazy idea. Perhaps that’s why it was so important for him to help me place the first Shinto god in the lake in Norway. My father, unintentionally, had acknowledged that his ways weren’t working. He didn’t know if mine would, but he knew we had to stop this vicious cycle.

  “Anyway,” I said to Wolfgang after he had successfully navigated around the stopped trucks. “I’m conducting the interview. What about your father?”

  Wolfgang continued talking about his father and his family. After a few moments, he seemed to have forgotten me and was only speaking for the microphone. “My father had no family. He didn’t know his father, just his mother. He hated his stepfather. He was mostly raised by his grandmother. He left home when he was thirteen and joined Hitler’s youth organization where he finally found a family and friends. He was happy.”

  Just before we entered Berlin, the wide, four-lane autobahn became a narrow, two-lane road. We passed a Soviet camp, with soldiers walking near the highway, guns slung over their shoulders. Wolfgang stopped talking.

  At the West German checkpoint at West Berlin, the road broadened again. Running parallel to the road was the Berlin Wall, a concrete barrier illuminated with bright searchlights. We could see East German guards perched high above in towers. The Wall rose three times higher than a person could reach. It was capped with rusty barbed wire, and it seemed indestructible. I turned off the tape recorder, which had nearly reached the end of the tape anyway. Neither of us spoke until the road turned away and we were engulfed with the bright cheerful lights of West Berlin.

  Wolfgang let out a long breath, which he had held when he first saw the Wall. “I love this city.”

  We stopped at a corner and picked up a few curry wursts and bread. It was Wolfgang’s favorite kiosk, and the woman behind the counter recognized him even though he had moved to Munich many years earlier. She asked him about his film business, and he told her how happy he was to be in Berlin, if only for a few days.

  We spent the night with friends of Wolfgang, in Kreuzberg, Wolfgang’s old neighborhood, now filled predominately with Turkish guest workers. While Wolfgang gossiped with his friends, I lay on the couch and listened to the BBC, then to American Armed Forces radio, and finally to the Voice of America before falling asleep.

  For breakfast Wolfgang and I visited a Turkish coffeehouse and ordered tea, sipping the rich amber liquid from small clear glasses as we read the morning paper. Wolfgang read aloud a report about a bomb scare at a nearby hotel.

  “That’s nothing.Just a scare. It’s calm. Things must be good between the United States and the Soviet Union, because Berlin is a barometer. Calm here means calm between the superpowers.”

  Just a few weeks earlier, President Reagan and the Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, had met in Reykjavík for a historic arms control summit. For a short time it looked as if they might agree to eliminate virtually all nuclear weapons. I was thrilled that once again my placing of a Shinto god had coincided with a move toward world peace. At the end of the summit, however, Gorbachev insisted that Star Wars be scrapped, and Reagan walked away from the negotiating table. Even though the superpowers had talked and the world seemed a little safer for it, I recalled the monster I had imagined on Lake Lögurinn and wondered if the calm was only short-lived.

  Back in the car we began our tour of the neighborhood.

  “I used to deliver mail here,” said Wolfgang, pointing over the steering wheel. “I knew all the people. I loved the job.”

  “Here, this is where I was born,” he said, motioning down a small street toward a lovely park filled with children playing. “This was all rubble.”

  Beyond the park was the Wall, looking a bit less dramatic than the night before, but still impressive.

  I pulled out the tape recorder. This was historic, and I wanted him to tell me about the Wall and what he remembered.

  Wolfgang hesitated for a moment. The tape recorder made him think carefully before answering.

  “We lived very close to it. See.”

  He stopped the car so I could get a good look.

  “It went up in July and August of 1961. I was fourteen, and away at summer camp. When they began to build it, my camp counselors told me that I could never go back to see my parents. They didn’t know exactly where the Wall was placed. There was no way to phone so I couldn’t call my mother. Finally I went back to Berlin. I think it was August 14th or 15th. The wall was only 200 meters from my house. We were still in the West, but I had friends on the other side. I immediately went looking for them. It was very crowded because everyone was looking for their friends and family. I never saw my friends again.”

  We got out of the car. I kept the tape recorder near Wolfgang as we walked toward the Wall.

  “After a while it wasn’t that big of a deal. The Wall became part of our playground. It belonged to my surroundings. We kicked the soccer ball against it. We painted it. It was quiet near the Wall since there weren’t any cars. But I never understood why it was there.

  “At first a lot of people escaped by jumping from the houses that were close to the Wall, but then
they destroyed all the houses near the Wall and built the Wall higher.

  “When I delivered mail, I used to throw cigarettes and newspapers over the Wall and talk with people. They asked me how it was over here. They asked if there was a possibility to open the Wall so they could see their children or friends. They didn’t know what was going on because the government controlled the news.

  “I don’t like the Wall. I don’t like that they forced people to join the party. But they have some good ideas in East Germany. They have no unemployment. They have child care rights for the women. They have the same medical care for everyone.

  “My friends call me a ‘social romantic.’ I just feel everything should be equal between people.”

  As we continued our tour of his old neighborhood, Wolfgang would periodically look at me and ask: “Here? Is this where you’d like to place the Shinto god?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  We walked close to a canal that ran out from the Spree River. It was near the Wall, and an East German guard watched as we playfully took pictures of each other, our hands outstretched against the Wall.

  Up close, the Wall no longer looked so indestructible. It was made of crummy concrete and there were many cracks. I reached into one and dislodged a piece the size of my fist. It was covered with blue graffiti.

  I said to Wolfgang, “It’ll make a good souvenir....”

  Wolfgang looked at me patiently, wondering if I was joking.

  Then he watched as I placed the piece of the Wall into my camera bag and pulled out the Shinto god. Before he could say anything, I unwrapped the cloth and turned my back toward the East German guard, perched high on the tower above us.