The Moment (13 page)

I walked down Unter den Linden right to the edge of this blockade. There were no guards here, no sentry towers. I knew from some reading I had done that while climbing over the wall itself was not difficult (it stood only around fifteen feet high), the would-be escapee then encountered a no-man’s-land, laden with trip wires and patrolled by guard dogs. Hardly anybody ever made it through this death strip, as the surveillance was too formidable and the trip wires too densely planted. Then there was the well-known “shoot to kill” policy that all East German border guards followed when it came to firing on anyone who did not halt when ordered to. To continue running after being caught in noman’s-land was to invite death. Even though the standard jail sentence for the crime of “attempting to flee the Republic” was three years—and the subsequent loss of all employment or housing status in the GDR (in short, an even more circumscribed and bleak life)—the vast majority of attempted defectors now tended to bow to the inevitable when caught. The number of attempted escapes had plummeted massively in recent years, as the authorities had become so ruthlessly thorough when it came to closing off all possible avenues of egress. How strange to approach this edifice with the understanding that you were closed in by it, that the idea of, say, picking up and moving to Paris for a year to write that epic verse novel you always promised yourself you’d tackle was simply beyond the realm of possibility. How strange to have a barrier placed around your state as a means of reinforcing your immobility.

But I had grown up with the absurd idea that the world was my playground; that, as long as I didn’t entrap myself, I was free to explore it as much as I wanted. That was the curious thing about life in the West. So many of us with the right educational and socioeconomic opportunities chose to close ourselves off into lives we didn’t want, complaining how we had become enslaved by mortgages, car payments, children. Whereas over here . . . well, entrapment had a rather different meaning in East Berlin.

I turned an about-face and spent the next few hours exploring the thoroughfare that ran from Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. Just beyond the Komische Oper I wandered around a large, sparsely stacked
Buchhandlung
named the Karl Marx. It largely seemed filled with yellowing political texts and GDR editions of East German writers like Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf. But there was a small section of foreign literature in German translation—again, all official East German editions, and works that had evidently passed the stringent censorship hurdles set here because they held up a critical mirror to the bourgeois, capitalist systems in which they were written: all of Dickens, Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary,
Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy,
Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter,
James Baldwin’s
Another Country,
Norman Mailer’s
An American Dream,
Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
.

There was a rather fetching young woman seated at the main information desk of the bookshop. She looked about my age, mid-twenties, with long black hair that had been carefully braided and piled up on top of her head in an immense bun. She was slender, wearing a simple black turtleneck, a somewhat short brown corduroy skirt, black tights. Despite her lithe frame, I immediately noticed the fullness of her breasts, the pleasing curvature of her hips, the absolute clarity of her flawless skin, the small granny glasses perched on the edge of her nose that gave her an air of attractive bookishness, the seriousness so apparent in her eyes. She reached for a packet of what I presumed to be local cigarettes. They were called f6—the packet looking like a throwback to the Second World War. As she fished one out, I could see they were filterless and loosely made.

“Would you like to try a Marlboro?” I heard myself asking.

She looked up at me, surprised by the question, surprised by my German. I could see her taking me in immediately. Before crossing I had stopped by the little corner store near the Café Istanbul and bought three packs of Marlboro, thinking they might come in handy on “the other side.” I could see her taking me in, noting the leather jacket I was wearing, the heavily soled English black boots, the thick scarf around my neck, and immediately sizing me up as an
Ausläunder
: a foreigner. Then I saw her eyes darting around the store, seeing if there was anybody there. There wasn’t, so she nodded and whispered, “Why are you offering me a cigarette?”

“Because I want to offer you a cigarette.”

I came over and proffered the pack. Again a nervous glance around the shelves and even outside to see if anyone was peering in through the window. Again the coast was clear. She reached over and pulled a cigarette from the pack, then took a box of matches and touched the flame to her Marlboro and the one I had placed between my lips. She took in a deep long lungful of smoke, the smallest of smiles forming on her lips. Then she exhaled, asking me:

“So let me guess: you figured the way to chat up a woman in East Berlin was by playing the GI in 1945 and showing up with some American cigarettes. So before coming over this morning . . .”

“How do you know when I arrived?”

“Because you
all
arrive over here in the morning, and are all gone by the witching hour. That’s how the system works. Unless, of course, you are here on official business, in which case you would not be here, trying to get me to spread my legs out of gratitude for letting me smoke one of your
so American
cigarettes.”

“Who says there’s any sort of ulterior motive here?”

“You’re a man. There is always an ulterior motive. And you’re an American—so you are an exploitative instrument of Western imperialism as well.”

She said this last part of the sentence with such delicious irony that I found myself even more smitten. She noted this, saying:

“Ah, look at the shock on your face at talking with a Communist with a sense of humor.”

“You’re a Communist?”

“I live here. So I am what the system tells me to be. Because that’s how I end up in a good bookshop like this one, in the capital, with a nice little apartment in Mitte which, I’m certain, you’d like to see.”

“Is that an offer?”

“No, just a further commentary on the ‘ulterior motives’ . . . isn’t that what you called them? . . . going on in that American mind of yours.”

“How can you be sure I’m American?”

“Oh please. But your German is rather good, which is a surprise.”

“My name is Thomas.”

“And my name is of no consequence here because my boss, Herr Kreplin, will be returning from his lunch in less than fifteen minutes. If he sees me talking to you . . .”

“I understand. Any chance I could see you later?”

“Where shall we meet? In a café in my quarter where everyone will notice that I am seated with an American? Or perhaps at my apartment? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, actually I would.”

My directness gave her pause for thought. Again a fast glance through the plate glass window into the street beyond.

“Perhaps I might like that, too, even though I doubt my boyfriend would approve. Not that he is that worthy of fidelity. But the problem with anything happening beyond this casual conversation in this bookshop is: when word got back to the ‘authorities’ that I was seen with a foreigner,
an American,
in a bar or had the audacity to invite him back to my apartment . . . and, trust me, someone would see us, someone would inform . . . well, good-bye to my nice job in one of the best bookshops in Berlin. And all because I was seduced by a Marlboro.”

Another deep drag on her cigarette.

“But it is a very good cigarette.”

“Keep the pack,” I said, putting it into her hand. As I did so she covered my hand with her free one and said:

“You must go. Go right now. Because if Herr Kreplin spies me here with you . . .”

“No problem. But please tell me your name.”

“Angela.”

“Nice meeting you, Angela.”

“Nice meeting you, Thomas. And I won’t say ‘See you around.’”

“That’s a shame.”

“No,” she said, her voice suddenly hard. “That is reality. And now,
Auf Wiedersehen
.”

I wished her good-bye and left. As I looked back, I saw Angela quickly secreting the Marlboros in her bag, her face radiating anxiety. A man in his fifties, carrying a vinyl attaché case and wearing a gray vinyl jacket, came walking toward me. He had thick Coke-bottle glasses. He looked me over with clear distrust. Once he had passed me, I turned around and saw that he had headed into the Karl Marx Buchhandlung. Was that Herr Kreplin? If so, Angela was right to shoo me away so quickly. He looked like such a functionary, such an informer.

And how the hell could you surmise that from a once-over glance on the street? Because Angela indicated that he wasn’t someone who would look kindly on her conversation with an American. And therefore . . .

We all make instant summations like this, don’t we? Especially when there is the edgy realpolitik of the East-West divide heightening the tension. And yes, I did feel an exhilarating tension while walking the streets of East Berlin. The tension of being in a largely forbidden place, where the undercurrent police state paranoia was already tangible. East Berlin: the bogeyman of all Cold War nightmares.

I pushed north, past the once-ornate, Hapsburgian-style collection of buildings that housed Humboldt University. I approached the front portals, thinking it might be interesting to wander inside, see if I could fall into conversation with some students, get an atmospheric whiff of life in an Eastern Bloc university, maybe even talk my way into a few beers at a local
Stube
with whomever I met. But as I got closer to the entranceway, I saw a uniformed guard checking the ID cards of everyone entering the premises. He glanced in my direction. From the look on his face he made it very clear that he’d immediately clocked me as a Westerner and was wondering why I was walking toward the entrance to this East German university. I smiled at him in a manner that hopefully hinted I saw myself as a thoroughly ditzy tourist who had wandered into the wrong place. With a quick about-face I headed back toward Unter den Linden.

I was in an area that had evidently not been flattened by the Allied bombing raids that had leveled Berlin. The western sector of the city, on the other hand, had been devastated beyond any sort of repair. The few historic buildings that remained in the West—the graceful apartment blocks around Savignyplatz, the occasional fin de siècle hotel—were somewhat akin to the two passengers of a jumbo jet who walked away alive when the rest of the flight went down. The ravaging was so thorough, so scorched earth, that little remained. Perhaps that was one of the stranger ironies about the postwar division of the city. The Western powers were handed the most leveled of landscapes and, in conjunction with the emerging new Bundesrepublik, reconstructed a city in a mishmash of modernist styles that radiated a certain raffish energy. Though the eastern sector also suffered dreadful bombardment, many of its quarters remained semi-intact, while the great ceremonial buildings leading up to Alexanderplatz also managed to largely survive. The problem was, the East couldn’t afford the funds needed to restore them back to their original splendor—and the prevailing Communist aesthetic was brutal and based in reinforced concrete.

So after the decayed splendor of Humboldt University and the Staatsoper and the extraordinary sight of the Berliner Dom—that vast variation on the St. Paul’s school of ecclesiastical architecture, its charred black dome reflecting certain historic realities—the German Democratic Republic had constructed perhaps the ugliest public works building I had yet to encounter. A squat concrete box stretching over several acres, angular and blunt in its lines, ashen gray breezeblock in color, and finished in a pebble-dash style. It was a profoundly Stalinist civic monument—the most striking statement yet of the way the hierarchy of this state saw the world. For this was Der Palast der Republik: their parliament and the administrative nerve center of the Socialist Workers Party that always won every rigged legislative election with 90 percent of the vote. Aesthetically, the People’s Palace reflected the visual barbarity that was The Wall. It informed all onlookers: In this People’s Republic there is no belief in the redemptive power of beauty. There is just this stark vision of life as harsh, callous, unkind.

Further up Unter den Linden the boulevard intersected with one of the great geographic locations in twentieth-century German literature, Alexanderplatz. For here Alfred Doblin set his famous 1929 novel,
Berlin Alexanderplatz
. It not only painted a panoramic portrait of low life in this, the actual physical center of Berlin. It remains one of the great novels to have emerged during the Weimar Republic: that German golden age between the two world wars when the country underwent nothing short of a creative revolution and reasserted itself as the great artistic innovator of its time. So much that emerged from the Weimar Republic—from the Brecht and Weill collaborations, to Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus School of Architectural Modernism, to Thomas Mann’s dense bildungsromans, to the visionary early films of Fritz Lang—let it be known that Germany (and, specifically, its capital city, Berlin) was so cutting edge, so out there when it came to redefining the global artistic landscape. The arrival of Nazism at the end of the 1920s was the jackboot forcibly crushing this brief, short interregnum of wild creative freedom and easy mores.