Secret Father (25 page)

Krone reached back to me and Mrs. Healy. "Passports, please," he said loudly, an obvious display of English. We handed them over, and Krone in turn passed them up, with his own, to the woman at the desk. They exchanged a few words in German, then Krone motioned us along without waiting for the woman to return our passports. In such a sea of hostility, a passport can seem like the log that keeps one afloat—and I almost protested. Instead, I followed Krone's lead through yet another door. As we went, he said, "This would be far more complex on a normal day. Today they want us in the East to see their great parade."

In the next room was a bank of cashiers' windows along the far wall, like at a racetrack. Several dozen people stood in four lines, and we joined one. Within minutes, we had each filled out a form declaring what currency we carried, and we had each purchased the minimum quota of East German marks.

In a way, it was the defining ritual of our passage, since the Cold War itself had begun as a currency dispute at the outset of the occupation of Germany in 1945. The Allies had agreed to institute a new reichsmark for all transactions, including the pay of their respective armies. American soldiers could redeem these marks for dollars, although Soviet soldiers could not redeem them for rubles. This led to a brisk black market between Ivans and GIs, with the American treasury providing Soviet soldiers with dollars, which meant that the United States was indirectly paying the costs of the Soviet occupation. To avoid that, Washington simply announced, one day in the late summer of 1945, that it would no longer redeem Soviet-issued reichsmarks, a move that instantly impoverished several million Russians—and started the currency dispute that had continued up to the moment of our arrival at the cashiers' windows in East Berlin.

From that room, we moved to a dark, narrow corridor that reeked of disinfectant. Male and female
Vopos,
their attack dogs standing by, cursorily searched us. I was behind Krone, and was startled to see him throw up his hands, allowing one policeman to pat him down while another eyed the form he had filled out. They took Krone's wallet. The interest was not in weapons but in currency. Anything they found in excess of what his form declared they would confiscate, adding to the admission charge. But it was also clear that undeclared currency would put you at their mercy—the main reason, I saw, for the whole cumbersome procedure. As the policeman took my billfold, I felt a twinge of worry that somehow the bills I had left behind in Krone's car had suddenly materialized again. When the
Vopo
returned the billfold to me and I slipped it back inside my jacket, I noticed that perspiration had soaked my shirt.

At the far end of that corridor was a final desk, where our passports, having been mysteriously brought forward, were returned to us without comment by another dour, age-uncertain woman. With the passports, we were each given a receipt stamped with the sum of money we had exchanged and a notation marking the amount of foreign currency we were legally carrying—zero. These receipts we would be required to show upon exiting East Berlin, when, equally clear, we would be subject to search again.

Moving through a last set of creaking turnstiles, we found ourselves out in the cavernous main hall of the train station, a warehouse-like area, depressingly drab but for a cone of mote-filled sunshine slicing down from a central skylight. Altogether, the open space was an antidote to the choking claustrophobia I had felt in the transit areas. Dust, ash, and an even sharper blast of disinfectant soured the air—disinfectant already my association with the public interiors of East Berlin. Yet breathing had never seemed so sweet.

I looked around at the people. No one seemed to be watching us. The hall was a massive postwar construction of concrete and girders, undistinguished in every way, as if thrown up by the engineer corps without an architect. There were wurst wagons, a standup coffee bar, and several beer windows. Ticket windows blanketed one wall. There were soldiers, some in the green of East Germany, some in the brown of the Soviet Union, red stars on their hats. There were
Vopos.
The few civilians in evidence were crossing toward the large doorway through which drifted the strains ofband music from outside.

Krone was anxious to get out there, but halfway across the hall, I stopped him. I pointed back to the transit area through which we'd come. "The kids had to go through that?"

The image ofMichael limping from the towering desk to the cash windows, past the guard dogs, under the hateful eyes of machine gun–toting
Vopos
—all waiting for what mistake? The image of my son, my boy, my child, here without me. "To get into East Berlin they had to run that gauntlet?"

The normally ingratiating Krone met my eyes coldly, as if impatient that I should have been surprised to be intimidated, even afraid. What the hell did I think the world-historic conflict was about if not something frightening?

Krone said calmly, "The young people went through that or its equivalent at halfa dozen other transit points, although I suggest the likelihood of their having done so here"—he gestured toward the square where the music was coming from—"if their object is the parade, which one assumes it is, since they are boys drawn, no doubt, to marching bands and tanks. So yes, just like that, presuming they did cross into East Berlin this morning, or at least"—he grinned, daring to tease me—"presuming they crossed legally."

This entire account has as its implicit subject my unreadiness to be the parent of a mature person capable of coping with the vicissitudes of life, even as tied to the uneven contest of world politics. But, as Edie might have said: Politics, shmolitics. Michael's distance from me had nothing to do with Stalinist police, and his jeopardy, as I felt it, was that of an unstable walker taking his uneven steps too close to an edge. Never mind that the edge was the armed border between two Germanys, and the danger the machine guns cocked to enforce it.
Oh Michael,
I might have cried in a dozen other circumstances, all relatively mundane, yet crying still,
where in God's name are you?

In other circumstances I would have been angry. Here I was only afraid.

Krone led the way out into the dazzling light of the early afternoon. I followed Mrs. Healy, whose stride was so purposeful that it was impossible to imagine that she harbored anything like the fleet of fears that had rafted themselves to me—which is how little I knew at that point. Her dread had the advantage of being tied to what was real. And truly lethal.

Outside, the sight of a throng of people—a sea of color—transformed my perception. I listened for a buzz of anticipation, but did not hear it. Instead of the communal lightheartedness of a typical crowd, this one gave off an air of anxious gravity, which I registered like weather. We had come upon them from the rear, thousands and thousands, and could see how they were pressing forward, away from us, as one creature. The crowd stretched across a vast open square—Alexanderplatz, what Krone had referred to as Alex. On the far side, like a matching bracket to the
Hauptbahnhof,
stood a large, redbrick building, the traditional
Rathaus
of Berlin. Its pair of towers reached into the blue sky. It appeared that the building had been reconstructed since the war, a centerpiece of this Socialist showplace that was marked on another side by a soaring television tower, the
Fernsehturm,
a needle spire topped with a great steel globe. I had seen the tower before, but only at a distance. From immediately below it seemed unreal, and the clouds moving behind made the thing seem ready to fall on us.

But the focal point of the square was the
Rathaus
façade, which was draped half by a huge flag—the black, red, and gold of the DDR, its hammer-and-sickle seal encircled by golden sheaves of wheat—and half by a fluttering banner showing the iconic face of Walter Ulbricht, East Germany's own Lenin. His eyes stared blankly out over the crowd and seemed, like the eyes of some Byzantine Christ, to have been waiting to lock upon us.
You!
those eyes seemed to say, and I looked away.

In front of the
Rathaus,
facing us and visible above the hats, scarves, and bare heads, was the elevated reviewing stand, draped in red bunting. A line of—to us—small old men in gray topcoats and uniforms, homburgs and peaked hats, stood looking out in our direction. Across the distance, they resembled a row of stern-faced stacking dolls. In fact, they were looking at the parade going by just below them, the parade that was as yet nearly invisible to us. All we could see were flags and streamers carried by invisible marchers. We watched the colors dip as they passed the center of the reviewing stand.

To the right, just coming into view, was the pointed tip of a massive green missile, angled upward, a giant's cartridge aimed at heaven. This was the first of a succession of such weapons in the parade, and soon we could see them coming in a rolling line, a full battery of missiles. Their profile was easily recognized by a newspaper reader of the time, for these were Soviet surface-to-air missiles, proud cousins to the high flier that had brought Gary Powers down the year before. I nearly nudged Mrs. Healy to tell her this, but I recalled that the U-2 incident had brought her husband out of cover as an intelligence officer. I realized again how much more heavily all of this fell on her than me. Everywhere she looked was an implication of threat, whether past or to come.

Krone took us each by an elbow and proceeded to push through the crowd. "The point is to search for them, no? They are the self-centered young, so it is unlikely that they would remain back here, unable to see. Wouldn't your sons and their friend push forward to draw close to things?"

"My son is lame," I said. "He walks with difficulty, carries a cane."

"All the more reason to look for them closer on. A boy with a stick—Germans would be kind to him. Even East Germans."

They were not kind to us, but Krone's display of authority was like a wedge as we moved through the crowd. Strangers deferred to him simply because he let them see he expected them to do so. Moving constantly, we were able to efficiently pass through. At one point a universal gasp of amazement, followed by robust applause, drew our attention back to the parade. We saw a line of four huge, trailer-borne intermediate-range ballistic missiles. We did not know it then, but these weapons were of the type that were soon to salt the cane fields of Cuba. After the initial applause, the crowd fell ominously silent for the moments it took the missiles to pass by.

Then there were formations of dark green Soviet tanks, their steel treads clanking, turrets emblazoned with gleaming red stars, phallic muzzles proudly angled up. Next came phalanxes of soldiers of the National People's Army. Their goose-stepping sent a surprised chill through me, which Krone registered. He explained that in Berlin the goose step evoked not Nazis but Prussians, with whom East Germans were still allowed to identify.

For most of an hour we elbowed our way through the crowd, Mrs. Healy looking for her Ulrich, her Rick; me looking for my Michael. After scanning the front edge of the crowd, where the kids would most likely have been, I began to feel discouraged. Exhausted, too—I hadn't slept the night before.
Michael, where are you?

Drawing close to the reviewing stand at one point, we could see the facial features of the Central Committee and Politburo members. If Yuri Gagarin was there, I did not see him. I wondered about the senior Stasi official Krone had referred to, dead in a fire. Was he supposed to be up there? And then I thought of Krone's saying there were no coincidences in Berlin, no accidents in Stasi offices. What about Frankfurt, I wondered. Mrs. Healy had asked what day that fire happened. What about the shooting in Rhine-Main Hall? What day was that?

We could see that the civilian apparatchiks on the reviewing stand wore beribboned medals on the breasts of their topcoats, just like in Herblock cartoons. We also saw that some of the dignitaries were Chinese, perhaps North Korean, and I wondered if the Asian Reds planned, as soon as the festivities were concluded, to get the hell out of flashpoint Berlin?

Judging from their impassive but alert expressions, the ruling elite of the Communist world seemed no more authentically enthused on their great day than the twenty-five or thirty thousand subdued people below. The leaders gazed out like spooked sentries. The throng wore the taut face of an entire society, dead afraid.

 

Many of the young people we saw wore the blue shirts and red neckerchiefs of the so-called Free German Youth, but they lacked the crazed enthusiasm of the Hitler Youth they had succeeded. It was impossible to imagine the timid kids who gave way at Krone's gesture barreling down the street smashing the glass of Jewish-owned storefronts. The point was that none of the German young wore penny loafers or blue jeans, chino trousers with little belts in back, crewneck sweaters, or button-down shirts. None of them, I was at pains to notice, wore leg braces or stout brown orthopedic shoes. None of them carried canes.

"Hello, Charlotte," a bearded, bespectacled man said, stepping out of the crowd to block Mrs. Healy's way. His blond hair struck me, and I had the feeling I knew him, but I did not recognize him. With the collar of his worn tweed jacket turned up around a black turtleneck sweater, he looked like a professor—a German professor. But his accent and his ease in approaching Mrs. Healy were pure American. Sunlight glinted off the lenses of his glasses, making it hard to focus on his face.

Mrs. Healy seemed unsurprised. "Hello, Hal," she said.

"We'd better talk," he said, "but we shouldn't do it here."

An encircling wall of Germans pressed us, their blocky unfashionable clothes, their stink of sausage and beer, their blank eyes. East Germans clearly aware of us as Westerners.

Hal made a show of studying me, then Krone. I sensed it when he decided to ignore us for the moment.

He pointed to a small grove of birch trees on the edge of the plaza, toward the base of the television tower, away from the parade. "Perhaps there." He turned and led the way. Mrs. Healy followed, then I did, and behind me, Krone. I realized that two other men, at least two, were moving in sync with us toward the trees, at a remove. One of them wore a tan windbreaker that looked American, the other wore aviator sunglasses.