‘But not as much fun.’ I smile back.
He takes this as an invitation and comes to sit on my bench. ‘You’re not from around here,’ he says, reaching into his pocket for a tin of tobacco.
‘No.’
‘You from Cologne?’
‘No. I’m—’
‘Lemme guess. Hamburg?’
‘No, I’m from Australia.’
‘Oh,’ he says. He leans in to me and puts a large hand with curved brown fingernails on my knee. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he breathes, ‘I too have impure blood.’
I’m smiling, astonished. ‘How’s that?’
‘My mother was a Pole.’
‘Oh.’
He starts rolling a cigarette. His grey hair is brylcreemed into a neat duck’s tail. His moustache is stained brown where he sucks the cigarette. When he puts it in his mouth he can keep talking hands-free, the cigarette clinging mysteriously to his bottom lip.
‘You like this park?’ he asks.
‘Yes, very much.’
‘This park is good, but you should come mushrooming with us sometime. That’s the best.’
‘Really? Where do you go?’
‘We all get on the train, me and some of my friends there.’ He gestures to the others who have been watching us intently, but now turn quickly back to their business. ‘We go out to the end of the line with our baskets and gather mushrooms. It’s fantastic!’
I’m wondering whether he’s having me on, painting a picture of train-riding drunks springing sprightly through the forests with their baskets and beer, plucking dainty mushrooms as they go, waving at the elephants. But he’s not.
‘We get,’ and he lists the species, ‘
Steinpilze
,
Pfifferlinge
,
Maron
,
Bergenpilze
,
Butterpilze
,
Sandpilze
—they are yellow underneath and spongy.
Rotkappe
—they look like
Fliegenpilze
but aren’t, and—’, something I don’t quite catch, ‘but you mustn’t take them, because those you can only eat once!’ He laughs, throwing his head back so I see an expanse of gum and ridged palate like an underwater thing. ‘We get four kilos in each basket, and we come home and cook them up with a little butter—superb!’ He waves a forefinger in front of me. ‘You know,’ he says, bringing the finger to his chest, ‘when it comes to mushrooms, in that field I am a professor!’
Professor Mushroom’s medal wobbles a little, blinking in the light on his stomach. A mumbled chorus of approval comes from the other benches; his friends raise their cans to him. I’m glad to be here. It strikes me as absurd to have never spoken with these men before who have been, after all, my neighbours.
He continues with some advice. ‘You’ve got to get outdoors,’ he says. ‘You know, television is not good for the eyes. Not healthy.’ I wonder if he was somehow watching over me that winter, seeing the flickering black and white at my window. Maybe these men, stationed in parks and on street corners, at tramstops and in the underground, are the ones who see everything now. A woman walks past on her way to the lights, and he lifts his hand in greeting, or to let her pass.
‘Back in the GDR I was a tailor. Now that’s not good for the eyes either. I wanted to be an actor or a cook, but it didn’t happen.’ I think he has become both, with this performance and his sautéed mushrooms. ‘Until 1990 I was in the voluntary fire brigade, but then it all went to hell in a handcart. This
Kapitalismus
, you can’t imagine the sort of shit it’s building.’ He sniffs and spits onto the ground. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a comb. ‘It was so much better before. I’m in the same flat—then it cost me 450 marks a month, and now it’s 804! So what if we didn’t have bananas and mandarins! It doesn’t take a banana to turn me on!’ He runs the comb carefully through his coiffure. ‘I used to be able to get five kilos of potatoes for next to nothing, beer was fifty pfennig a can and now what? Transport was thirty pfennig and twenty on Fridays. I mean we had a social state—you didn’t even have to pay for medicine. I tell you I just don’t get it. It’s all stupid now.’ I glimpse past him and see that his friends are nodding in silent, unsteady agreement.
I have heard this kind of thing before, though ex-Stasi men, privileged left-wing intellectuals or former Party members complain more about airfares: ‘What good is freedom to travel when I can’t afford to go to New York/Las Palmas/New Zealand for my holiday?’ Once in Leipzig, an old woman in a pub, drinking her daily schnapps at four in the afternoon, said to me, ‘Well, this is better than the Weimar Republic and better than the Nazis but bring back the Communists, is what I say. The pubs were fuller under Honecker. Cheers.’ I don’t doubt this genuine nostalgia, but I think it has coloured a cheap and nasty world golden; a world where there was nothing to buy, nowhere to go and anyone who wanted to do anything with their lives other than serve the Party risked persecution, or worse.
The morning has come alive now, insects dance over the grass and pollen hangs in the light as people walk through the park to Rosenthaler Platz station. Professor Mushroom is on a roll. ‘Back then when you were drunk the police would just take you under the arms and set you down on a bench. Now, we can’t even sleep here any more or we’d get robbed! It’s terrible the morals these days. Do you know you can get mugged for one cigarette! It’s the Russian mafia and the Romanians and the gypsies. If a gypsy woman came and danced on this bench, I tell you your wallet would be gone in a flash!’
This complaint, too, I have heard before in different versions: an ache for a lost time when things were more secure. In a security state, after all, the least the authorities could do when they were incarcerating so many innocents was to clean up the criminals at the same time.
‘Look, 200 metres over there’—Professor Mushroom extends his arm and I see a swathe of grey chest hair between his braces—‘was the Wall. Before we had that, the Wessis flocked over here and bought up all our stuff! We put up the Wall so we could go shopping in our own shops! In the end though, they pulled the Wall down and bought us all up anyway, those Wessis with their western money—all the factories and businesses and even the pubs. And they won’t let us hold our heads high now—oh no!
‘I’ll tell you honestly about the border.’ He pats my knee again. ‘And I am an honest man. We all knew, every GDR citizen knew, that if you went close to it, you’d be shot! That’s all there was to it! So we stayed here! I mean they should have all sat here on their arses—then they wouldn’t have got them shot full of lead!’
I know this argument as well: if you didn’t buck the system, then it wouldn’t harm you.
But, from what I have seen, it probably would.
The professor shakes my hand. ‘You really should come mushrooming with us,’ he says. The chorus rumbles and nods and I thank them and go, up to my palace of light and air and lino.
In this soft spring I have taken to walking everywhere. It’s about 10 pm, and the sun has only just set. Cherry trees lining the streets scatter pips and juice stains over the pavement like blood. I walk home past the outdoor cafés at Kollwitzplatz where students, largely from the west, sit eating and laughing. I’m not sure how much they know of what has gone on in this place. I’m dreaming at the kerb as a woman in a jester’s cap and short shorts nearly clips my ear as she cycles past.
By the time I turn into my street the sky is black. A man is hunched unsteadily against my building, banging along it like a fly at a window. In the darkness he is more a shape than a person, an outline with a bottle in his hand. He is drunk—very drunk. When I get closer he reaches towards me and speaks, but it’s not clear whether he’s addressing me or the universe.
‘I don’t want to be German any more!’ he sobs. ‘I don’t want to be German any more!’ His face is tracked with silver tears.
‘Why not?’ I hold out a hand to steady him.
‘We are terrible.’ He has hardly looked at me. He couldn’t know I’m not German. ‘They are terrible. The Germans are terrible.’
He moves off, tapping his way along the buildings.
Which Germans did he mean? Some, or all? For this East German man, long used to thinking the bad Germans were on the other side of the Wall, maybe now it’s hard to tell. Are they really so bad? Or are they worse than he thought? And were his people, now broke or drunk, shamed or fled or imprisoned or dead, any good at all?
A friend of mine who works at the File Authority calls me up.
‘We had an interesting request here for a personal file yesterday,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d let you know.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Mr Mielke.’ My friend chuckles. We both know without saying: Mielke must think the apparatus he created was so thorough, with an administrative impetus all of its own, that somewhere, someone was keeping tabs on him.
A few days later I call Frau Paul. We chat for a while. She is active in an organisation for those persecuted by the regime—taking tours of Hohenschönhausen prison (‘we’re thinking of putting a coffee shop in there,’ she tells me), and campaigning for compensation for victims. Then she says, ‘There’s something else.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was followed home the other evening, from a public meeting on compensation.’
‘What?’
‘It’s true. A car followed me to the underground at walking pace. I was with friends and I didn’t think much about it. But when I got out of the train at Elsterwerdaer Platz I was alone and it was there waiting for me. Then it followed the bus. When I got off the bus it turned its lights off, and drove behind me right to my door.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘there are a lot of people who don’t want us to raise our voices, to fight for what we deserve.’
‘Do you have any idea who it was?’
‘No. But it was almost certainly an ex-Stasi man.’ She is frightened, but she is steely. ‘It was a Volvo,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for a Volvo driver.’
Mielke died this week. He was ninety-two. The headlines read, ‘Most hated man now dead.’ I think of the other ‘most hated man’ and give him a call. His wife answers the phone and passes me to her husband. Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler tells me he’s not well, and that things are getting worse. By ‘things’, he means the world around him. ‘People are still spreading lies about my dear friend Erich Mielke and he’s under the ground! On Monday the urn was interred and on Tuesday it was desecrated! Right under the noses of the police guarding it! Do you understand? My friend’s ashes were scattered and his grave plot was de-se-cra-ted!’ His voice is exactly the same: hoarse, old and angry. ‘That is capitalism, naked and brutal! An absolute
Unkultur
.’
The desecration of Mielke’s grave is unlikely to have been the work of westerners, and it is only a product of capitalism in that capitalism does not protect, or not adequately to his mind, the former leadership of the former GDR from what their people thought of them. I hear fear though in his voice, the flipside of fury. Fear perhaps that his end, soon to come, will also be a desecrated grave. Then I remember his conviction to the cause. I think he may not be so much afraid of death itself but that it will eliminate, finally, his powers of rebuttal.
Today I walk from my place up Brunnenstrasse, past Frau Paul’s tunnel to Bernauer Strasse where the Wall was. There is a new museum here. Its greatest exhibit is opposite: a full-size reconstructed section of the Wall, complete with freshly built and neatly raked death strip, for tourists. Right alongside it in Bernauer Strasse there are still some pieces of the real Wall, covered, as they always were on the western side, with bright graffiti. These remnants are behind bushes though, scrappy and crumbling. In some places the steel reinforcements in the concrete are bare as bones.
The new Wall, however, is pristine. It is utterly without grafitti. I can understand why the original has all but disappeared, and why, as Frau Paul and Torsten said, people wanted it to. But this new one is a sanitised Disney version; it is history, airbrushed for effect.
Inside the museum there are displays and touch-screen presentations showing how the Wall was built, recordings of Kennedy’s ‘
Ick bin ein Berliner
’ speech, and dramatisations of various escape attempts. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ a man with his back to me is saying to another man behind the counter, ‘I’ll take them from here and bring them back here. I think it’ll take about two hours. That’s what I’m going to check now.’
‘Right then,’ the other man says, then he looks over at me. He is wearing fancy eyeglasses that appear to be held together by a row of miniature, multicoloured clothes pegs. ‘Can I help you?’
The man standing at the counter turns around to have a look at me. ‘Frau Funder!’ he cries. It is Hagen Koch. ‘Well, well, well! How are you? Yes! You might like to come with me!’ He speaks in exclamation marks. It is as if I have hardly been away. For him the past is the Wall, and I am part of the present, whether three years ago or now. His hair has turned white, but his eyes are the same bright and smiley brown.
‘Herr Koch, I’m well, thank you. Come where?’
‘I’m taking a busload of tourists tomorrow along the route where the Wall was, because you can hardly tell any more. I’m off now to check how long it will take.’
‘I’d love to come.’
We are to drive along the municipal boundary where the Wall was built: in a ring around the old city centre in the east, and past the western suburbs of Wedding, Moabit and Tiergarten. Then, he says, we will drive where the Wall went right through the centre of town, down Niederkirchnerstrasse through to the Spree River, and along its bank to the Oberbaum Bridge.
We climb into his small red car and he drives fast and sure. He is happy to have an audience to rehearse his ‘tour of the forgotten city’ routine. The first stop is just down the street, a stretch of grass maybe a hundred metres wide. Straggly weeds grow to knee-height, sway like sentient things in the warm air. There’s a cemetery behind here. A large stone angel on a pedestal is turned this way, her head bent low in prayer. We walk out to the middle. The sky seems wide in this place.