Authors: Ian McEwan
In fact it was not quite possible to stroll, the crowd was so dense. He got his bearings from the Gedächtniskirche and the hideous new structure at its side. He passed Burger King, Spielcenter, Videoclips, Das Steak-Restaurant, Unisex Jeans. The store windows were filled with clothes of babyish pastel pinks, blues and yellows. He became caught up in a surge of Scandinavian children wearing McDonald’s cardboard visors, pressing forward to buy giant silver balloons from a street vendor. It was hot and the traffic roar was continuous. Disco music and the smell of burning fat were everywhere.
He went down a side street, thinking to walk around in front of the Zoo station and the entrance to the gardens, but soon he was lost. There was a confluence of major roads he did not remember. He decided to sit down outside one of the big cafés. He passed three, and every last bright plastic chair was taken. The crowds moved aimlessly up and down, squeezing by each other wherever the pavement space was taken up by café tables. There was a crowd of French teenagers all wearing pink T-shirts with
FUCK YOU
! printed front and back. He was amazed to find himself lost. When he looked around for someone to ask, he could find no one who did not look like a foreigner. Eventually he approached a young couple on a corner buying a pancake with a crème de menthe filling. They were Dutch, and friendly enough, but they had never heard of the Hotel am Zoo, nor were they entirely certain of the Kurfürstendamm.
He found his hotel by accident and sat in his room for half an hour sipping an orange juice from the minibar. He was trying to resist irritable reminiscence.
In my day
. If he was going to take a walk down Adalbertstrasse, he preferred to remain calm. He took from his briefcase the airmail letter he had been
rereading on the plane and put it in his pocket. He was not yet sure what he wanted from all this. He was eyeing the bed. The experience on the Ku’damm had drained him. He could happily have slept the afternoon away. But he forced himself up and out once more.
In the lobby he hesitated as he handed in his key. He wanted to try out his German on the receptionist, a young chap in a black suit who looked like a student of some sort. The Wall had gone up five years after Leonard had left Berlin. He wanted to have a look while he was here. Where should he go? What was the best place? He was conscious of making elementary errors. But his understanding was good. The young man showed him on a map. Potsdamerplatz was best. There was a good viewing platform and postcard and souvenir shops.
Leonard was about to thank him and cross the lobby, but the young man said, “You should go soon.”
“Why’s that?”
“A little while ago the students were demonstrating in East Berlin. Do you know what they were shouting? The name of the Soviet leader. And the police hit them and chased them with water cannon.”
“I read about that,” Leonard said.
The receptionist was in his stride. This seemed to be a pet theme. He was in his mid-twenties, Leonard decided.
“Who would have thought that the name of the Soviet general secretary would be a provocation in East Berlin? It’s amazing!”
“I suppose so,” Leonard said.
“A couple of weeks ago he came here, to Berlin. You probably read about that, too. Before he came everyone was saying, ‘He’ll tell them to take down the Wall.’ Well, I knew he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. But next time, or the time after—five years, ten years. It’s all changing.”
There was an admonitory grunt from the inner office. The young man smiled and shrugged. Leonard thanked him and walked out into the street.
He took the U-Bahn to Kottbusser Tor. As he emerged onto
the pavement he struggled into a hot gritty headwind, which brought with it scraps of litter. Waiting for him was a skinny girl in a leather jacket and tight stretch pants patterned with moons and stars. As he walked by her she murmured,
“Haste mal ’ne Mark?”
She had a pretty but wasted face. Ten yards past her he had to stop. Was it possible he had got off too soon, or too late? But there was the street sign. Ahead of him a monstrous apartment complex straddled the way into Adalbertstrasse. On the concrete pillars at its base were spray-painted graffiti. At his feet were empty beer cans, fast-food wrappers, sheets of newspapers. A group of teenagers, punks he supposed, were lying by the curb, propped on their elbows. They all had the same bright orange Mohican haircuts. Their relative baldness made their ears and Adam’s apples protrude unhappily. Their heads were bluish-white. One of the boys was inhaling from a plastic bag. They grinned at Leonard as he stepped around them.
Once he had walked under the apartments, the street was half familiar. All the gaps had been filled in. The shops—a grocery, a café, a travel agency—all had Turkish names now. Turkish men stood around on the corner of Oranienstrasse. The amiable vacancy of southern Europe looked unconvincing here. The buildings that had survived the bombing still bore the marks of gunfire. The machine gunning of No. 84 was still there above the ground-floor windows. The big front door had been repainted blue many years ago. In the courtyard, the first thing he noticed was the dustbins. They were huge and mounted on rubber wheels.
Turkish children, girls with their younger brothers and sisters, were playing in the yard. They stopped running when they saw him and watched in silence as he crossed to the rear doorway. They did not respond to his smile. This pale, large, elderly man, dressed inappropriately for the heat in a dark suit, did not belong here. A woman called down what sounded like a harsh command, but no one stirred. Perhaps they thought he had something to do with the government. It had been his plan to walk up to the top landing and, if it seemed the right thing,
to knock on the door. But the stairwell was darker and narrower than he remembered and the air was close, saturated with unfamiliar cooking smells. He stepped back and looked over his shoulder. The children continued to stare. A bigger girl picked up her younger sister. He looked from one set of brown eyes to another, then he walked back past them and into the street. Being here did not bring him any closer to his Berlin days. All that was apparent was how far off they seemed.
He went back to Kottbusser Tor, gave the girl a ten-mark note as he passed and took a train to Hermannplatz, where he changed for Rudow. These days it was possible to go right through Grenzallee, all the way by U-Bahn. When he arrived he found a six-lane road cutting across what he sensed was his direction. Looking back toward the center of the city, he saw clusters of high-rise buildings. He waited at the pedestrian lights and crossed. Ahead of him were low apartment buildings, a pink stone cycling path, neat rows of streetlights, and parked cars lining the curb. How else could it be, what could he really have expected? The same flat farmland? He passed the little lake, a rural memory preserved by barbed-wire fencing.
He had to look at his street plan to find the turn. Everything was so neat and crowded. The road he needed was called Lettbergerstrasse, and its shoulders had been newly planted with sycamore trees. On his left were new apartments, barely two or three years old by the look of them. On his right, replacing the refugee shacks, were the eccentric one-storey holiday homes of Berlin apartment dwellers, with their intensely cultivated gardens. Families were eating out in the deep shade of ornamental trees; a green Ping-Pong table stood on an immaculate lawn. He passed an empty hammock slung between apple trees. Barbecue smoke rose from the shrubbery. The sprinklers were on, soaking stretches of pavement. Each tiny plot of land was a proud and orderly fantasy, a celebration of domestic success. Even though scores of families were packed together, a contented, inward silence drifted upward with the heat of the afternoon.
The road narrowed into something like the track he remembered. There was a riding school, expensive suburban houses, and then he was walking toward a new high green gate. Beyond it, a hundred feet of rough ground; then, still encircled by its double perimeter fence, the remains of the warehouse. For a moment he stayed where he was. He could see that all the buildings had been leveled. The white sentry box stood tipped at an angle by the inner gate, which was wide open. On the green gate immediately in front of him a sign proclaimed that the land belonged to an agricultural company and warned parents to keep their children away. To one side was a thick wooden cross commemorating the attempts of two young men to climb the Wall in 1962 and 1963,
“von Grenzsoldaten erschossen.”
On the far side of the warehouse, a hundred yards beyond its outer fence, was the pale concrete curtain, blocking the view to Schönefelder Chaussee. He thought how strange it was that he should come here to get his first sight of the Wall.
The gate was too high for a man of his age to climb. By trespassing along someone’s drive he was able to get over a low wall. He passed through the outer fence and stopped by the second. The barrier, of course, was gone, but its post was still there, standing clear of the weeds. He peeped into the lopsided sentry hut. It was filled with planks. The old electrical fittings were still in place, high on its inner wall, and so was the shredded end of a telephone line. He walked on into the compound. All that remained of the buildings were crumbling concrete floors where weeds were breaking through. The rubble had been bulldozed into piles at one end of the compound to form a high screen facing the Wall—one last titillation for the Vopos.
The main building was different. He walked over and stood a long time by its remains. On three sides, beyond the fences and the rough ground, the holiday homes pressed in. On the fourth was the Wall. Radio music was playing in a garden somewhere; the German taste for military rhythms lingered in its pop music. There was a weekend laziness in the air.
What remained in front of him was a huge hole, a walled trench, a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide and perhaps seven feet deep. He was staring into the old basement, now open to the skies. The great heaps of tunnel workings were all there, thick with weeds. The basement floor must have been another five feet down, under the earth, but the pathway between the heaps was clear enough. The main shaft at the eastern end was lost under rubble. It was so much smaller than he remembered. As he clambered down, he noticed that he was being watched through binoculars by two border guards in their tower. He walked the path between the piles. There was a lark twittering high above him, and in the heat it was beginning to irritate him. The ramp for the forklifts was here. The shaft started there. He picked up a piece of cable. It was the old three-core, with its thick, unyielding copper wire. He poked at some earth and stones with the toe of his shoe. What was he expecting to find? Evidence of his own existence?
He climbed out of the basement. He was still being observed from the tower. Brushing away some dirt from the brick ledge, he sat down, with his feet dangling into the basement. This place meant far more to him than Adalbertstrasse. He had already decided not to bother with Platanenallee. It was here in this ruin that he felt the full weight of time. It was here that old matters could be unearthed. He took the airmail letter from his pocket. The envelope with its crossed-out addresses was fascination enough, a biography whose chapters were a succession of endings. It was from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and had left the United States ten weeks before. The sender was thirty years out of date. It had been sent to him initially in care of his parents, to their terraced house in Tottenham, where he had grown up and where they had lived until his father’s death on Christmas Day, 1957. Prom there it had been forwarded to the nursing home where his mother had spent her last years. Then it had been sent on to the big house in Seven Oaks where his own children had grown up and where he had lived with his wife until five years ago. The present owner had kept the letter
for many weeks and then had forwarded it with a batch of circulars and junk mail.
He opened it and read once more.
1706 Sumner Drive
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
March 30, 1987
Dear Leonard,
I think there’s only the smallest chance in the world this letter will ever reach you, I don’t even know that you’re alive, though something tells me you are. I’m going to send it to your parents’ old address and who knows what will happen to it then. I’ve written it so many times in my head that I might as well get it down anyway. If it doesn’t reach you, it might help me.
When you last saw me at Tempelhof on May 15, 1956, I was a youngish German woman who spoke good English. Now I guess you could say I’m a suburban American lady, a high school teacher staring retirement right in the face, and my good Cedar Rapids neighbors say there isn’t a trace of German in my accent, though I think they’re only being kind. What’s happened to all the years? I know that’s what everyone asks. We all have to make our own arrangements with the past. I have three daughters, and the youngest finished college last summer. They all grew up in this house, where we’ve lived for twenty-four years. I’ve taught German and French in the local high school for the past sixteen. For the last five I’ve been president of our Women in Church organization. That’s where my years have gone.
And in all this time I’ve thought about you. A week hasn’t passed when I haven’t gone back over things, what we might or should have done, and how it could have been different. I was never able to speak about it. I think I was afraid that Bob might guess at the strength of my feelings. Maybe he knew anyhow. I couldn’t talk to any of my friends here, even though it’s a close sort of place and there are some good people I trust. There would have been too much explaining
to do. It was so bizarre and horrific and it would have been hard to make anyone understand. I used to think I might tell my eldest when she was grown up. But that time, our time, Berlin, is so far away. I don’t think I could get Laura to really understand, so I’ve lived with it alone. I wonder if it’s been the same for you.
Bob left the service in 1958 and we settled here. He ran a business retailing agricultural machinery and made quite a success of it, enough to keep us all comfortably. I taught school because I was always used to having a job. It’s Bob I want to write to you about, or he’s one of the things. In all this time I’ve known that there has been an accusation hanging in the air, a silent accusation from you and one that you ought to know is completely unfounded. This is something I’ve needed so much to get straight. I hope God helps this letter reach you one day.