Leaving Berlin Read online

  I am not sure what he meant by that. (I’m half German.) The people he was referring to — men and women alike — were all staring at him, some with delight at the sight of the dark-eyed brooding stranger, others with a perverse sort of dread and longing, assuming no inhibitions in the long-haired freak before them. A man grabbed himself at the crotch and threw Henry a kiss, a woman pulled up her blouse and exposed her breasts, wiggling her hips. Henry ignored them.

  Never had I felt such a rube. The club we went to on a dare the following night had shown pornographic cartoons on a large screen above the bar. In Snow White, the prince resuscitated the heroine with more than just a kiss while seven horny dwarves looked on, friskily masturbating in rhythm to the thumping glass coffin. They were well-hung dwarfs, I will give them that, but they came up short compared to the Prince. No wonder he could wake the dead.

  Henry had watched it with a patronizing smile. I kept sneaking glances at the rest of the clientele, expecting I don’t know what. A glassy-eyed masturbation orgy? Most of them, no more than a dozen, looked half asleep. A well-dressed hunchback was snoring face down at a table in a corner, clutching a half eaten peach in his left hand, a limp red satin tie dangling from his neck.

  When I wanted to leave, Henry insisted we finish our beer. “This piss cost an arm and a leg,” he lectured, pointing to his mug.

  I sat down. We stayed until our mugs were empty.

  At the station I decided to pop down to the Damen before we went in search of the train bound for the Sassnitz/Trelleborg ferry. As I had no German change, I waited outside an occupied cubicle, ready to grab the door when it opened. Having observed local custom the past few days I knew this was the common manoeuver for sneaking a free pee. It was in order to please Henry that I had become an expert at crossing my legs long enough to keep five Pfennig from ending up in enemy hands.

  The toilet flushed and the door opened to reveal a six-foot-plus transvestite, his teased blond hair sprayed into a stiff beehive, his cherry-red lipstick clashing with his blue eye shadow. He wore a fake mink coat draped over his shoulders over a blue satin dress tight enough to reveal an endowment similar to Snow White’s cartoon prince.

  Outside a man’s voice sang out. “Veeeera! Kommst du schon?”

  “Ich komme jetzt!” bassooned the baritone blonde, winking at me as he held the door open to bequeath me his throne. He had pissed all over the seat, which, as a lady, he had seen no reason to raise.

  You would think that as a lady, he’d piss sitting down.

  All at once I longed for home. Only another week to go. We were on the last leg of our disintegrating foray, a northbound army of two fighting itself, on our way to Copenhagen to visit some Danes we had managed to befriend in Spain the previous New Year’s Eve. Befriending people was a daily challenge in Henry’s company, but Jens, Inge and Hans had been so gregarious, so easygoing — so unlike us — that we came to depend on them for a good mood, needed them to stand between us like a jovial buffer zone. New Year’s Eve had been the best day of our trip. Having sampled the wines in all the twenty caskets in a bodega in Motril (including four kinds of sherry), we had ended up blind drunk and inseparable, misty-eyed as we belted out Auld Lang Syne like there was no tomorrow, quietly drinking Spaniards — all men, there were no other women — staring with contempt at our performance.

  By the time the church bells tolled and the new year began, Henry and I had forgotten who and where we were. When he kissed me I imagined that he meant it. Imbibing twenty kinds of wine in less than four hours does cloud one’s interpretive powers.

  By the time we arrived in Berlin, New Year’s Eve was a distant embarrassment.

  The wall sliced the city in two jagged halves, barbed wire coiling atop the length of it. Large stretches were decorated with impressive graffiti. There were machine gun-toting soldiers staring mindlessly from the guard towers at Brandenburger Tor and Checkpoint Charlie, soldiers who looked too young, the machine guns too heavy for their bony shoulders.

  Henry found this concrete monument to man’s inhumanity thoroughly fascinating. It confirmed his worst suspicions about mankind and that always had an uplifting effect on him. “That sucker is twelve feet high and more than a hundred miles long, did you know that? In some places it goes right down the middle of the fucking street!” The numbers made his fingers spring to life, searching new rhythms.

  “And what is it you find so intriguing about that?” I wanted to understand his fascination.

  “The thinking behind it. The twisted reasoning of the human mind. The sickness it is capable of.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He was right.

  The wall was a looming threat the night we crossed into East Berlin from the neon jungle of the West. The train hurried headlong into stark emptiness, leaving behind the human zoo of masturbating dwarfs and satin transvestites. On the other side of the wall it was as if everybody had fled long ago.

  Not a gaudy freak as far as the eye could see, no con artists doing card tricks, no beggars and street performers, no movie houses, restaurants, bars, strip clubs and discotheques, no refugees selling useless knickknacks on dirty blankets on the sidewalk. East Berlin was a ghost town. There was nothing and nobody at all. It was as if the gaudy half of the city had sucked all colour and energy out of its ailing twin and left it for dead.

  “It looks like an abandoned movie set,” reflected Henry. “Must be what inspired those black and white spy movies where it always rains and men in bad suits slip across the wall to save mankind from communism.”

  Unsure if he was talking to himself or to me, I offered no reply.

  The train drew to a stop beside a desolate stretch of platform. After a while two uniformed men came marching out of the station building.

  “Vatch out, Fräulein! Ze batt guys are comink to get you!” This time Henry was talking to me. A door slammed further down the train. A few minutes later the same two men pulled open the door to our compartment and shot a single word at us: “Pässe!” We handed over our passports. From the vague amusement with which they inspected our Canadian documents, one would have thought we had presented them with hand drawn amateur forgeries.

  Then I got worried. People in authority took an instinctive dislike to Henry. It never failed. Apart from his scowl, which now was quick to take up position, he had long dark hair and an attention-seeking moustache. He wore a fringed suede jacket he had got cheap by bargaining a pissed off Algerian to the ground at a street market in Marseilles. In fact, Henry looked more like an ill-tempered Mexican bandito than a basically honest, if dysfunctional, Canadian composer/musician.

  The taller of the two uniforms decided it might be strategically advantageous to search Henry’s luggage. That was all right. Henry looked like the type who carried a ton of illegal drugs, but he didn’t. He carried no drugs at all (though he would have brought a stash of weed, had I not put my foot down), and he was smuggling neither weapons nor government secrets. All we hauled around in our backpacks were clothes and the odd souvenir to prove that we’d been where we’d been. And books. Blessed books. The less we had to say to one another, the more avidly we read. Books make excellent shields.

  The taller uniform won the treasure hunt. He pulled two books out of the bottom of Henry’s backpack with a triumphant grunt and held them up, his arm straight in the air. One of the books was Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, the other Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. We had bought them one rainy afternoon in Torremolinos in a small bookshop on Calle San Miguel. Afterwards we had hurried to a café and ordered tea and toast before taking shelter behind our new books, avoiding each other in a civilized manner.

  The uniforms stepped out into the corridor to confer. Their expressions were those of men who had stumbled upon all the military secrets of the Soviet bloc about to be smuggled out by a shady bandito and his clueless moll.

  One of them disappeared, the other returned to our compartment and slid the
door shut. He did not return our passports. Without a word he sat down beside Henry and stared hard at the ceiling. Mimicking him, Henry stared in the same upward direction. As he did so, he began clicking his heels, producing perfectly the staccato approach of a goose-stepping army.

  Ignoring them both, I contemplated the unexpected turn of events, wondering how the uniforms would react if they decided to ransack my bag to find Doris Lessing and Kurt Vonnegut pressed front to front atop my dirty underwear.

  The platform remained empty. East Berlin was without sounds — apart from Henry’s goose-stepping — until a few minutes later when a train door slammed farther down the platform. Purposeful feet marched in our direction, never missing a beat, echoing in the train corridor. Henry kept thudding his heels, keeping pace, until the other uniform pulled open the door again. He had brought with him a third official wearing a much fancier get-up. Der Kommandant, as Henry would refer to him.

  Der Kommandant was a tall, elegant man. He occupied the doorway for a moment, allowing himself to be beheld for an appropriate length of time. His back was straight, his uniform immaculate, his deportment arrogant; he was fully aware of what a striking figure he cut. Looking first at Henry, then at me, he wished to know, pointedly: “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

  It was not a question as much as an order. Judging by his countenance it would be advantageous to answer in the affirmative. Best to confess then.

  “Ja, ich spreche Deutsch,” I said. Half-assed Deutsch anyway. My mother was born in Frankfurt. Should I tell him that? Would it win me favour?

  My gut instinct told me not to bother.

  My affirmative reply made Der Kommandant raise one thin eyebrow in my direction. He stepped through the door into what suddenly felt like a prison cell and sat down beside me. Gingerly he placed his right leg over his left before folding his hands over his knees, executing each graceful gesture with slow and studied perfection. Having achieved the precise position necessary for whatever he had in mind, he proceeded to interrogate me, pleasantly aware of my fear.

  Where did we come from? Where were we going? And why? Why were we in possession of this propaganda material? He pointed to Speer’s book. Where had we got it?

  “Why this unhealthy interest in the affairs of the Third Reich? Why should this be of interest to Canadians? Is it not a bit . . . how to put it . . . perverse? Hm? Answer me please.”

  The questions, though asked unhurriedly, were fired in a sharp tone indicating that we had committed not only an illegal act, but one of unparalleled stupidity. The gravity of our crime was unpardonable. We were to expect no leniency. There were no mitigating circumstances in a case such as this, and if we did not understand that we were even dumber than we looked.

  I offered no excuse for our wrongdoing. I had none, only the bland truth that when we had been looking for something to read in an English bookshop in a winter-deserted tourist trap in Spain a few weeks earlier, Henry had thought Inside the Third Reich looked interesting. So had The Godfather. It was, as I pointed out in our defense, on every bestseller list in the free world.

  Der Kommandant’s eyebrows fluttered ever so slightly at “the free world.”

  Ignoring his expressive brow, I rambled on, explaining that, as the choice of books had been somewhat limited, we had bought these two because we had needed something to read that afternoon, you see, Mein Herr, and the next day on the train to Barcelona, and later on the bus from Barcelona to Geneva, and on the train from . . .

  Here I raised my doomed head and looked into a pair of eyes so supremely indifferent to my rambling that I clammed right up.

  Henry, who had been treated as invisible during the interrogation, burst out with a helpful, “Tell that fucking asshole we’ve done nothing wrong. Go on, tell him!”

  After giving Henry a look so icy cold it actually shut him up, Der Kommandant repeated every single question again, enunciating each word with such pedantic accuracy it was as though he had an obsessive love of language.

  Once more I repeated what I had already struggled to communicate with grammatically bungled phrases about our plunge into a life of international crime. By then more than half an hour had passed since the train stopped. They had yet to return our passports. The compartment was cold. I was sweating.

  Surely there were other people on the train? Impatient people fidgeting in their seats, checking their watches, swearing in various languages, livid at the delay? Why were no voices raised in protest, no enraged passengers spilling into the corridor demanding an explanation? Why were we surrounded by silence?

  I realized I was terrified. Soon I would be writing to my parents from an East German jail cell to inform them that I would not be returning home.

  It pleased Der Kommandant enormously to see the terror in my eyes. I detected a flicker of amusement in his.

  “So, kindly remember in the future, young lady, that it is forbidden to import this kind of propaganda into East Germany. Attempt to learn the rules of a country before you decide to visit. Understood? Hm?” Bored with the game, having had his bit of fun, Der Kommandant suddenly spoke English. It was as flawless and precise as his German.

  “Understood.”

  “Good girl.”

  As he got up he reached out and touched my cheek with a smooth hand that smelled of cigarettes. It was not so much a pat as a slap just weak enough to pass for a gesture of kindness.

  One of the other uniforms flung our passports onto the seat beside Henry. Taking his leave, Der Kommandant informed us that they were confiscating the “propaganda material.” The Godfather was included under that heading.

  Henry’s scowl was severe. He spat a sentence at me. “You realize those were the same robots goose-stepping for Hitler during the war?”

  The train had left Berlin and was chugging north towards the coast, headlong into a squall sweeping down from the Baltic Sea. Furious rain lashed the window.

  “Never mind,” I said. I felt faint with relief. “We’re free.”

  “Whoopee shit.”

  “And we’ve read the books.”

  “What the fuck’s that got to do with it?”

  “Nothing. So why don’t you let it go?”

  “Bet you those bastards couldn’t wait to read The Godfather. Notice Der Kommandant spoke English after all?” Henry’s agitated fingers started drumming on his knees, out of rhythm with the rain, accompanying a frenzied fugue only he could hear.

  “Well, you enjoyed it.”

  The drumming stopped, fingers halting in midair. “Are you trying to piss me off?”

  “No.”

  I pissed him off with no effort at all.

  He started drumming again, faster this time, accelerando, like feet running.

  I spent the night alone in the train ferry cafeteria. It was jam-packed with drunks shouting and singing in what I assumed were one or more Scandinavian languages. Everybody chain-smoked and chain-drank throughout the night, from teenagers to pensioners. Where did they get the energy? Every table except mine was overflowing with beer bottles and schnapps glasses, the floor soaked with spilled drinks. The smoke was so dense it obscured people’s faces, but at least it was warm in there.

  Henry huddled out on deck in the privacy of the windswept rain, a quixotic figure facing south to where the lights along the German coast grew ever distant. Only Henry would choose to sit in cold drizzle, shoulders hunched, convinced he was proving some significant point that I in particular and the world in general were too shallow to grasp.

  He did not budge all night. The wind kept tugging at his wet hair, tearing at the fringes of his jacket.

  We reached Copenhagen early the next afternoon. With our friends as buffers we had a wonderful five days. The sun was shining, the beer was cheap, the Danes blessed with a natural knack for enjoying life. Nobody was in a hurry. It was springtime, there was music in the air, a million tulips and Easter lilies drenched the parks and the markets. Jolly citizens zoomed around on bicycles with bouquets of spr
ing flowers in the front baskets. We were told that it was not unusual to see the Queen of Denmark pedal her bike about town.

  Even Henry found it difficult to dislike a country whose queen rode a bike. That all the pretty girls flirted with him also helped soften his heart. They had a way of pressing their gregarious boobs against him when having a conversation, flicking their Danish blond tresses over lissome shoulders, asking him brazen questions in a singsong accent. None of them wore a bra.

  Henry pressed back and turned downright sunny.

  One night in a jazz club, amazingly, he let himself be persuaded to have a go at the piano after somebody discovered that he was a musician. He ended up performing to an enthusiastic crowd — half of them blond and bra-less and horny — until closing time, jazz tunes not his own, melodies full of life and energy and toe-tapping rhythms, smiling to himself the way he always did when his fingers gamboled over piano keys, that blissful smile I did not have the power to invoke. Perhaps smiling also at how easy it was for him to seduce a room full of people when he felt like it.

  Mistaking his private universe for mine, having drunk too many Tuborgs, I thought, “Why, that’s him! There he is!” as if he’d been gone for a long time and had only just now returned. As if he was back to stay.

  He wasn’t, of course. I was being my usual optimistic self. All the pleasantries were but an interlude. I was just one of the fools easily seduced. By the time we sat strapped into our seats on the charter flight from Gatwick to Toronto we were once again, for reasons as befuddling as ever, back in the trenches, not speaking. Except for halfway over the Atlantic when he turned to me and said, “Hey, want to get something to drink?” and I tiredly said yes even though I wasn’t thirsty.

  Later that day heading west from Toronto, I peered out the plane window with jet-lagged eyes and discovered to my consternation our relationship sprawled down below. It must have fallen out of the plane somehow, because there it lay, a barren expanse, hard and cold and flat, with large patches of ice like dead skin on its cracked surface, too far gone to survive. The shadow of the plane slid across it like a knife.