The Berlin Crossing (9 page)

I took it gingerly. I pressed it between my fingers. Softish, like paper, or cloth. But solid.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pastor Bruck said. ‘Your mother gave it to me the last time I saw her.’ A weary smile. ‘Not like this,’ pointing
to the plastic bag in my hands. ‘She gave me a cardboard box, for safe keeping, she said.’ He stopped, looking beyond us to
the shadowy trees. ‘It was too dangerous for your mother to keep, I suppose; she had you by then, she had someone else to
worry about.’

‘And who was going to worry about you?’ Thomas interrupted. ‘Tell me that, who?’

‘Thomas, Thomas.’

His son snorted. In one movement he stooped, grabbed the board from the ground and hurled it into the open grave. Without
another word he stormed off. We could hear the cottage door slam shut behind him.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I seem to have a gift for upsetting your son.’

‘It’s not you, Herr Ritter, just all that has gone before.’

For a moment we both stared in silence at the mud-covered board leaning askew in the shallow grave.

‘My son was seven years old when they came, Herr Ritter. Three of them, in the dark, a freezing night. They drove the van
into the church grounds, took it in as far as they could. They manhandled the box out of the van on to a trolley and forced
my son to wheel it here between the graves. The trolley fell over once, they made jokes that it might break open and what
would Thomas do then? They picked this spot, Herr Ritter, and the three of them stood here smoking while Thomas and I dug
the grave. They mocked him, made fun of the way he was digging, said a girl could dig better.’ He bowed his head. I waited
while he visibly pulled himself together. ‘It wasn’t deep enough, Herr Ritter, but they said it was deep enough for what was
going into it and anyway they were too cold, they said, standing around in a graveyard. They almost threw the box – the coffin
– down there but they waited until Thomas had filled it in again. They warned us to say nothing, Herr Ritter, to put no name
or mark on the spot.’

Something was bothering me.

‘But how did you know it was . . . Roland?’

‘When the box – coffin – fell off the trolley. They prised the lid
off with a crowbar, just a little, but enough for me to see his face.’

I stooped to pick up the board that Thomas had flung into the grave and manoeuvred it to cover the gaping hole.

I didn’t want to look at the pastor.

‘I don’t understand, Pastor Bruck.’ I picked up the plastic bag, slimy from the wet earth. ‘How did this come to be in the
grave?’

‘I put it there, Herr Ritter.’ The beam of the torch traversed the nameless grave. ‘Well, Thomas did. Your mother gave it
to me some time after – after that night.’ A stomping of feet, against the cold, against the memory? ‘Your mother was brave
and resourceful, Herr Ritter, but she was also young and I knew she loved him. She knew he was gone, that he was never coming
back, but I was afraid that she might betray herself. She was under suspicion, they’d already questioned her but she had . . .
protected him. Now she had to protect herself, Herr Ritter. She was pregnant.’ Another shifting of feet, a cough in the night.
‘And there was my son to think of, a boy who had already lost his mother.’ He didn’t mention himself, I knew he wouldn’t.
‘Your mother was a brave woman, that’s why she never allowed herself to visit your father’s grave, except once.’

The wind rose; beyond us, the trees shivered in the darkness.

‘So you buried her . . . package here, beside . . .’

‘I buried it, Herr Ritter, further back in the forest. It could have been suicidal to put it down here, where they had ordered
him to be buried. You don’t know what they were like, Herr Ritter.’ A sucking sound in his breath, the swallowing noise of
an old man who could see more distant shadows lurking around the grave. ‘You never knew when they might come back and order
this –’
this –
‘dug up again. I had other lives to consider – my son – his mother was dead, he had nobody else.’

I waited for him to continue.

‘Your mother said to me that she wanted some memory to remain. Maybe someone will come, she said to me, maybe somebody will
come looking for him, there ought to be some remembrance of what happened here.’

I felt the priest’s grey eyes upon me:
you are that somebody
.

‘I thought her words were nonsense, Herr Ritter,’ a small, sad smile, ‘but I didn’t have enough faith, did I? Anyway, after
the Wall came down – long after that – we dug up your mother’s package from its hole in the ground and Thomas and I put it
in this grave. And we replaced the flat stone that marked it with this little wooden cross. We couldn’t do that before. We’d
all suffered too much, Herr Ritter. I was afraid of what they might do to Thomas.’

I felt myself shivering. I swung my arms against my body but the shivering wouldn’t stop.

‘Let’s go inside, Herr Ritter, some coffee will warm us. This is all a shock to you.’

If you only knew
, I wanted to say. I find a dead father. I hold a slimy, plastic bag full of god knows what from my mother. And you speak
of what
they
might do, how you were afraid of
them. They
and
them:
the officers, the guardians of my lost country.

‘Come.’ I felt his hand upon my arm. ‘But first . . .’

I watched as he crossed himself. And I went on watching, my head unbowed, as this ancient priest murmured his prayers over
the grave of my lost father.

It was a long winter. On the first day of December the snow fell thicker and heavier than even the snows of boyhood memory
and blanketed the streets of Brandenburg with a morning brilliance that suggested purity and promise and a world renewed.
I recall it with clarity because, when the snow began to fall, around 3 a.m., I was walking the frozen deserted streets of
the town, my footsteps echoing softly between the silent shops and apartment blocks. I was on the streets that night just
as I had been every night since Pastor Bruck had handed me the folded plastic bag from the grave that contained the remains
of my father.

There was no doubt in my mind that this mysterious Roland was my father.
Father: Johannes Vos. Occupation: General Operative
. Thus my birth certificate. A good man, my mother had told me, a kind man. A colleague at the printing works where she stacked
and folded paper for the presses. A kind man who died of cancer before I was born. A dying man, I told myself, walking the
winter streets, who had perhaps lent his name to help out a young and pregnant fellow worker. He had married my mother: that
certificate too was stored in the metal cabinet in the corner of our living room. My mother had never taken Johannes Vos’s
name. Nor had she given it to me.

But neither had she given me the name of Roland.

Odd, this
Ausländer
, this foreigner at large in our town, this
foreigner with the name of Roland: Roland, who was our city’s historic hero, our saviour from the Middle Ages, whose statue
still guarded our city hall. In the falling snow Roland’s statue stood as mute as the folded bag in the metal drawer beside
my birth certificate.

Yes, a long, silent winter. They cleared the pavements and the roads of snow but the whiteness cloaked the roofs and the towers
and the trees, muffling the medley of city sounds, the trundle of tyres, the clanging bells of the trams.

And muffling my heart, I thought, like a heavy scarf tied too tightly against your throat.

Of course, it wasn’t the snow that was stifling me. In my heart I knew that. The snowy, night-time streets were my escape
from the filing cabinet, from the plastic bag and its contents. I had never opened it. To make sure it didn’t suddenly open
itself I had even tied a couple of thick rubber bands around it. And the filing cabinet was locked.

Strings of coloured lights flowered between the white rooftops, beacons of Christmas consumerism above the windows of the
shops. On my night-time excursions I watched the lights blink and then die, promptly, at 1 a.m.
Shopping is done for the day, rest ye now from your buying and spending until the morn
. Sometimes the dipped lights of the squad car crawling towards me along the empty street would suddenly flare full beam at
me; blinking in the glare of the headlights I’d feel the eyes of the Polizei upon me as the car inched past; the eyes of outsiders,
clean eyes imported from Kassel or Stuttgart, clean eyes studying this nightwalker from a failed state, a befuddled rat who
didn’t realize that the ship had sunk. In their green and silver car they slowed, they stared, they studied. They never bothered
me. I wondered if there was a file on me in the refurbished police station.

I tried not to think about the other files but they dangled in
front of me anyway, hanging between the coloured bulbs above my head. Or they invaded my broken daytime sleeping, gate-crashing
the fragmented hours in my narrow bed. Brown cardboard files that bore the names of those who had fathered me.
Roland Something. Johannes Vos
. And the other one, the file with the name
Petra Ritter
on it. Buff-coloured files that had been compiled not by the lily-white hands of our invading masters but by the guardians
of my own lost land.

In the wonderland of our new and united Bundesrepublik you could examine the old files of the now-disbanded Ministry of State
Security. Our Ministerium für Staatssicherheit was now routinely referred to as a weapon of state oppression, its officers
regarded as little more than criminals. Only once, in the staffroom at my school, had I dared to point out that the MfS had
been a legitimate arm of a legitimate state and its officers had been charged with the protection of that state; the shocked,
embarrassed silence among my colleagues had taught me that in our great new and uncensored state some things were more uncensored
than others. And I’d been fired anyway.

Still . . .

Sometimes you had to bend the knee. Swallow your pride. Fill in the forms, say ‘please’ and open the files that might tell
you something about your fathers. Especially about the foreigner named Roland. Whose bones had been buried at night behind
an obscure chapel in Bad Saarow. Because of whom that skeletal old priest had suffered a broken back. And whose name my mother
had never breathed to me until she was almost about to breathe her last.

On a dull morning in late January, when the Christmas lights of the town had been filed away for another year but the rooftops
were still bright with frozen snow, I crossed the tramlined road from my apartment block to the freshly painted railway station
and bought a day-return ticket to Berlin. I sat upstairs in the streamlined double-decker train and watched the wintry fields
of my land speed past. It was a short trip, not much longer than half an hour, but the fleeting landscape was a slide show
of the country I had grown up in and what it had become. Vast silent fields where horse and man had toiled; the brick stations
of my youth shunted sideways and replaced with slicker, shinier versions. Our invaders had spent money – you couldn’t deny
it – but they took more than they gave. At Potsdam, on the edge of Berlin, a train from the capital was pulling in at the
same time: even in late January, with snow and frost on the ground, the backpackers spilled on to the platform, headed for
the palatial delights of the hitherto forbidden East. Back home in Sydney or Seattle these anoraked, cut-price travellers
would be able to boast that they had trekked in the homeland of the Stasi.

And in Berlin they could even gawk and exclaim amid its plundered headquarters.

At the Zoologischer Garten I changed trains, taking the local service as far as Alexanderplatz. Amid the quietness of the
elevated platform it was almost possible to forget the frantic, liberated streets below; I shut my eyes and let myself imagine
for a moment that the streets were still ours and uninvaded. The U-Bahn, Line 5, took me deeper into the old city, further
into streets behind the Wall they had torn down.

I climbed up the steps from the tiled station at Magdalenenstrasse. The wide thoroughfare of Frankfurter Allee throbbed with
the roar of traffic. Almost a blur of speeding chrome, all the colours of the spectrum, a flashing, noisy hymn to the glory
of the motor industry; slogan-splashed taxis; trucks and trailers from the four corners of Europe. I waited for the lights
and fled across the road for the safety of the complex of buildings on Normannenstrasse.

I walked a narrow road between a pair of multi-storey blocks
and stepped into a spacious square surrounded on all sides by a series of tall buildings. Hundreds of windows gazed down,
one side lit now by a sudden blast of cold wintry sun from the west. There was neither art nor artifice in these buildings:
plain, unadorned, no more than functional, these grey, multi-windowed structures reflected the state they had served.

The sometime home of the Ministry of State Security was demonized now:
here be dragons
. The mere mention of the Stasi was enough to set the grown-up children of modern Germany shivering in their beds.

Now they called it a Research and Memorial Centre. A tourist attraction. A disgorging point for coachloads of pensioners from
all over the Bundesrepublik. Trek through the lair of the bogeyman and mail the postcards to your nearest and dearest.

Three coaches were already pulled up alongside Block 1. The pensioners were still easing themselves down from the last of
the buses: Heritage Tours, the bus proclaimed, Hanover.
Step this way, ladies and gentlemen, and marvel at the past you have delivered us from
.

I followed the babbling herd through the front door into the reception area. I half heard the babbling Hanover guide laying
down the ground rules as I looked around me. Fearful and curious about what kind of theme park they had made of the place.

It was as I remembered it. The pale tiles on the floor. The wide marble staircase. The high soaring ceiling. They’d even left
our flag on show, furled, of course, in submission.