Europe Central (103 page)

25

Fortunately for the Free World, in Tempelhof Field we’d dreamed up a great ring of hangars and terminals around the circular runway: Tempelhof Airport, with the pair of facing lions in the shadow of the two facing towers! Much of this edifice existed only in the model of the architect Sagebiel, but at least the eagle on the passenger terminal’s roof had established itself on earth; I remember seeing Russian soldiers hoist their flag up there in ’45; despite their best efforts, our eagle dwarfed them. As for the unfinished bits, no matter; we could always dream them into solidity.

Two Red Army men in forage caps and long greatcoats were clearing mines with circle-headed wands; they wore rifles at their backs, rubble before and around them. What were they really afraid of? Maybe some explosion would wake up the East, and then summer light would rush in! God knows. As it turned out, they were readying the ground for the Wall. It wouldn’t be long before the day when reliable Soviet soldiers began unrolling the very first ring of barbed wire, flush up against
their
side of the sign which said
BRITISH SECTOR.

26

And what about me?

By rights I should have been relegated to the worst list of all, but the pale man in dark glasses was sentimental, I think because I’d told him that I’d once floated past a certain long line of trees in Dreamland where his father’s house used to stand; needless to say, I’d never been there, but he believed me. Operation ELENKA had always been a long shot; the Luftwaffe blueprints had been recovered to the satisfaction of the Amis, and countering the Berlin blockade was now Priority Apple. Moreover, precisely because I didn’t know who I really was, I had a way with dream-creatures. GRAENER, GREINER; HAVEMANN and PFITZNER all tried to do what I eventually did; none could withdraw the sword from the stone! For my own part, upon receiving my authorization from the highest levels of the Gehlen Organization, I clambered up to the roof of Tempelhof and struck the stone eagle with a stick. Away it flew, screaming!

Roger, Wilco, A-OK! Our airlift idylls began.

27

Here came the
Rosinenbombers,
bearing powdered milk, butter and chocolate from our former enemies, the Anglo-American Jewish plutocrats; today it was clear that our differences had been mistaken, and we all should have united against the Slavs back before Stalingrad fell.

Walls of flourbags, milkbags and sandbags rose in the warehouses! Then we really had to admit that the Amis were good.

Berliners queued up for their turn at the barrel of American milk. Smiling, skinny old men who remembered quite well how to shout
Heil Hitler!
wrapped themselves up in all their clothes, sat on rubble and drank bowls of American soup. One-legged black marketeers offering butter by a ruined wall looked up, while around the perimeter of Tempelhof our Amis kept rolling slowly forward, riding atop their open tanks; they were ready to beat off any monsters who might come sneaking towards us from beneath the Iron Curtain.

Another plane came through Dreamland, keeping our island vigilantly alive! (From the air, Berlin was an immense, intricately ridge-patterned butter-biscuit, whose inviting insets and arcs seemed to be made of hard white sugar; in fact it was all concrete.) More sweets flew to Tempelhof! Children ran to the summit of a hill of broken bricks, waving and waving to the American gods of chocolate.

More body-shaped bags of powdered foodstuffs descended from the bellies of those C-54s, which landed at Tempelhof every ninety seconds. It was like a dream.

We saved the black-aproned fishwives of the Markt-Halle; we allowed currency reforms to continue to incubate beneath the Reichsbank’s long square coast. We rescued the Kroll Opera House, where once upon a time the Enabling Act transformed our sleepwalker into absolute dictator. We preserved Tempelhof itself, where Käthe Kollwitz once took her son Peter to see the landing of the Wright Brothers’ “White Flame,” and the sleepwalker declared war on unemployment.

Do you remember that famous photograph of children perched on rubble and broken steel beams, waving at one of the departing
Rosinenbombers
? Nowadays we call that
disinformation.
We pretend that it was for them, like the sparks which caught them on fire when they tried to run away from Dresden. In fact they were keeping Berlin supplied just for me. I was their hero again, because I kept getting executed. I alone possessed the talent to go East. If I’d only been able to neutralize Shostakovich, then Western civilization would be saved. But since I couldn’t, well, you know.

Oh, yes, I hid from the Stasi and the NKVD in various fabulously ruined apartments, which narrowed into peaks as improbable as Gothic spires. It takes time to prove one’s unkillability. Sometimes I nightcrawled to the sign
YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR
, and then I did leave it, straight through the Iron Curtain! (Antifascist democratic state power leaked cloudy summer sunshine across the railroad ties. I could feel it, even though just then a rat came out.) I’d shot ELENKA so many times, it was only fair to let them shoot me a few more, too, as the working class demands. And it did, and they did. Sometimes I could hardly stay awake . . .

One occasion, right before they liquidated me (it never even stung), GLASUNOW stood watching, and he shouted:
West Berlin was never a part of the Federal Republic and will never belong to it!

But we didn’t care what GLASUNOW said! We stuck it out until the Soviets capitulated. They withdrew their blockade in the spring of ’49. We had a party at the office. After that, the “economic miracle” occupied us; we went from one victory to another. All the same, the Iron Curtain was more adamantine than an old soldier-woman’s cheekbones. But we didn’t care about that. As Comrade Honecker foresaw, we were already planning a step by step takeover by West German monopolies. On 5.5.55, the Allied High Commission dissolved itself! West Germany, the true Germany, was now once more a sovereign state!

28

What about Shostakovich and Elena? I was now so numb to them that I might as well have been asleep! I’d lost
her,
so why admit her existence? I’d failed either to kill
him
or help him, so why face my shame? I’d found myself; they loved me at the office; I was a symbol of the superhuman. I never woke anymore; I mean, I never slept; and once I enjoyed a waking dream of a darkhaired woman, stark naked, who gazed at me with wide brown eyes, unsmilingly proud; her gaze reminded me of a customs inspector’s; I think she might have been Elena Konstantinovskaya, but if not, she was probably Elena Kruglikova. Closing my burning eyes, I heard breathing all around me; in retrospect, I must have been at a movie theater, watching an old print of “Airlift Idylls,” starring Lisca Malbran. She wore a snow-white sailor suit but she was actually a paratrooper; they flew her across the lines so that she could single-handedly save Stalingrad. She was a heroine and I was a hero—a national hero. Every time I received another bullet in the neck, I got another medal, posthumously of course. Oh, I was on the good list now! I rationalized that here in Berlin, the entire world’s railroad tracks begin and end in parallels, so I knew that I could get to him or her somehow, or else, they could get to me. The Iron Curtain had never stopped me. Moreover, on July 1961, Comrade Ulbricht announced at a press conference that
no one has any intention of building a wall
!

And so on 13.8.61 Comrade Honecker proudly reported:
At 0.00 hours the alert was given and the action got underway.

29

Stalinallee, eighty meters wide, had become Karl-Marx-Allee by then. The Wall elaborated itself around the Curtain by the week, until it was even huger than the statue of the Red Army man in Treptow Park. Before the apartments on Bernauer Strasse got sealed off, I still used to see people jump, first out of the first floor windows, then out of the second. Well, they stopped that. Hardly anyone could get across anymore. I remember how the twin stone lions crouched down on their broken Lion Bridge as if they were about to howl at the two stone lions on the other side; I remember the Wall passing in sight of the demolished Potsdam Station; I can’t forget anything; my mind’s as full of armor as the old Ordens Palace. And now that’s gone, just like the Iron Curtain. But in those days, well, you know!

The Red Guillotine busily condemned people to death. Sometimes, when I wasn’t being executed myself, I used to watch the executions from one of the twin stone pillars which overlook Tempelhof’s circular runway. (I pretty much had my run of Berlin by then.) In Warsaw, a stone head and a stone hand lay separately in the dirt for years. Farther to the East, they still had everything: the straw palliasses in Soviet prisons, the many gold-framed icons on the Empress’s blue walls. But the Iron Curtain was shut; and the Wall, watched by long convoys of Ami jeeps with white stars and glaring headlights, killed ever more of its victims; watchdogs snarled in the death zone to defend inevitable upward development against the Teutonic Knights of NATO’s Operation Grey; President Kennedy called on the free world to be resolute; Adenauer sent his
brotherly love
to the East Germans
who are still forced to dwell, separated from us, in thralldom and lawlessness. We call to them: you are part of us, and we belong to you.
Hearing this, our truehearted West German women spontaneously presented him with a bouquet!

I wouldn’t want you to disbelieve in happy endings, at least not on our side. We’d won the inestimable treaure of democracy: shabby West Berliners lining up to vote, and silver-white summer clouds over everything. The new-planted saplings on Unter den Linden grew taller by the hour. A girl stood on one leg, blew cigarette smoke at me through painted lips, tilted her head and winked. ‣

THE RED GUILLOTINE

More quickly than Moscow itself, one gets to know Berlin through Moscow.

—Walter Benjamin (1927)

1

Once upon a time, although there might have been previous times, the first button glowed; then the telephone began to ring, straight from Europe Central. For the Red Guillotine, herself a member of the Zentralkomitee, and therefore aware of developments before the telephone told her, this was another moment to count up her triumphs and rejoice that her ideals grew more massive with the years. Outside, almost in sight of Berlin-West, our Thälmann Pioneers held hands in a circle, singing on a cobblestoned space which the Rubblefrauen had cleared of ruins. The Red Guillotine almost sang along. She’d been so happy in the Wandervogel when she was fourteen! The words had changed, but many tunes remained the same.

The telephone said: Sentence confirmed for Nellis.

Good, said the Red Guillotine, whom Comrade Sorgenicht has correctly eulogized as
Hilde Benjamin, Communist personality, who personifies the unity of theory and practice.
The so-called “West German” press describes her as
a negroid woman with dark, evil eyes, the female incarnation of Roland Freisler. Defendants know to expect no mercy from this charming individual.
Coming from such a source, this can safely be considered a compliment.

The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
neglects her in favor of that famous suicide-aesthete whom a weird chance made her brother-in-law. Nor has she been granted any monument in Comrade Honecker’s
From My Life.
These silences must not be misunderstood. Does the American Secret Service expose its most effective operatives for the sake of history books? The Red Guillotine remains one of our foremost
zero hour activists,
and in the era of this legend, most of which takes place between the constitutions of 1949 and 1968, we all saw her name if not her face. (Why not her face? We could never be certain that she wasn’t peering at us from behind the velvet curtains in the tiny windows of a Russian limousine.) I’m informed that she bore a physical resemblance both to Comrade N. K. Krupskaya, and also, as I said, to our fellow traveler K. Kollwitz, reproductions of whose sorrowful woodcuts we often show our Pioneers, in order to indoctrinate them with the appropriate class hatred. Kollwitz represented
herself.
The Red Guillotine represented all of us. It would be a pardonable error to conflate her with some Rodchenko-like profile of a woman made out of wire.

2

The tale is told that on that
zero hour
day when the victors mobilized our children to carry mirrors, typewriters and other booty out of our flats and to the trainyard where it could wait in the rain to go to Russia, the Red Guillotine strode into the office of the Soviet military commandant—not a place which most Germans visited lightly—and he received her, drunk and wearing four wristwatches.