The Moment (7 page)

“So as soon as I reached Berlin I called Florian. As luck would have it, he was in. He’d just been recently divorced, and had been spending the afternoon with his five-year-old daughter, Jutta. He’d just returned home after dropping her back to her mother’s when I called. His apartment was in Mitte. I walked over from Alexanderplatz to his place. When I arrived, I asked him to step out into the street, because I was worried his place might have been bugged. Then I told him what I knew, that a ‘big change’ was going to happen late tonight and I was certain this meant the border would be sealed. Like me, Florian went into immediate panic when he heard my news. The thing was, his editor must have been also informed by the Party hierarchy, as all staff leave had been canceled for the weekend and he had been told to report to work by eight a.m. Sunday morning—rather than midday, which was when everyone started work on the Monday morning edition.

“Florian never once said to me, ‘Are you sure about this?’ He believed me one hundred percent. And he started thinking out loud. ‘
You know that my ex-wife is very high up in the Party. If I went back for Jutta now, she might get suspicious. But when they close the border tomorrow . . . Then again, what is better? That my daughter comes with me to the West or stays here with her mother?’

“This monologue went on for several minutes. Night had fallen. It was almost eight in the evening. Time was running out. I looked at my watch and told him that we had to go now. He nodded and told me to wait outside. It was a warm August night. I smoked two cigarettes and looked at the street. Gray buildings, all in a run-down state, all painted in the bleak, functional palette of Communism. I thought about my father and whether my departure would hurt his career. I thought about Florian and hoped that he would invent some excuse to pick up Jutta and bring her with us. But when he came outside, he looked ashen.

“‘I just called Maria’s apartment. They’ve gone out. If we wait until they get back . . . well, there’s no way she will hand Jutta over to me at eleven at night without wondering what is up. So . . . ’

“He hung his head—and I could hear him catch a sob in his throat. Then, wiping his eyes, he said:

“‘I have an extra bicycle here. We ride to Friedrichshain.’

“And we cycled the twenty minutes from Mitte to a place near a road that ran on both sides of the frontier. There were two Volkspolizisten standing guard on the GDR side—and a simple gate separating the East from the West. But we could see that the Volkspolizisten were checking papers very thoroughly and holding people up and not letting anyone through, even though it was still marginally legal to cross from one sector to another. So we slipped down a side street and up to a block of apartments that faced onto a street that ran parallel with the border. Florian’s friend had told him the key to the apartment was atop a fuse box in the hallway. I held my breath as Florian searched for it. When he found it and opened the door, we found ourselves in a place that had been abandoned: a few mattresses on the floor, a filthy toilet, and a cracked window. There was a rope ladder attached to the window frame. Florian peered outside. He said the coast was clear. He threw the ladder outside and told me that I had to go down it now.

“I was terrified. I hate heights—and we were three floors up. The ladder was so feeble, so dangerous, that as soon as I put my weight on it I knew it wouldn’t hold me . . . and I only weighed fifty kilos at the time. I told Florian that I couldn’t do it . . . that I was just too scared. He literally grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and forced me out the window.

“The descent only took perhaps thirty seconds—because once I had grabbed hold of the ladder it was clear that I only had a few moments before the rope gave away. When I was about ten meters above the ground, the whole thing collapsed. I was suddenly falling—and, believe me, a ten-meter fall is a long one. I landed on my left foot and completely broke my ankle. The pain was indescribable. From up above, Florian began to hiss:

“‘Run. Run now!’

“‘You have to come with me,’ I hissed back.

“‘I need to find another rope. You cross now—I’ll meet you in a few hours at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis-Kirche on the Ku’damm.’

“‘I can’t move,’ I yelled back. ‘My ankle.’

“‘You have no choice.
You go now.
’

“‘Florian . . . jump!’

“‘Now. Now.’

“And he disappeared. My ankle was killing me. I could put no weight on it. But somehow I managed to drag myself the thirty meters across the barren area that was no-man’s-land and into the West. As there was still no Wall—still no trip wires or armed guards that would shoot to kill—there were also no Western soldiers awaiting me as I staggered into Kreuzberg. Just a Turkish man who was walking home and found me collapsed on the street, sobbing in pain. He crouched down beside me and handed me a cigarette. Then he told me that he would be back as soon as possible with help. It must have been a good hour before I heard the roar of an ambulance, by which time I was drifting in and out of consciousness. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in some hospital ward. There was a doctor there, telling me I hadn’t just broken my ankle, but also tore my Achilles’ tendon, and I had been knocked out with anesthetics for over eight hours. Beside him was a policeman who welcomed me to the Bundesrepublik. He also told me that I was a most lucky young lady, as the GDR had sealed the borders just after midnight.

“‘Did a man named Florian Fallada make it over?’ I asked the policeman. He just shrugged and said: “‘I don’t have any knowledge of who crossed over last night. What I do know is that it is absolutely impossible to leave the GDR now. It has become a hermetically sealed state.’”

Our plane banked suddenly, its nose headed toward the ground. Then, suddenly, the cloud cover lifted and I could see that we were moments from touching down . . . the last ten minutes of this flight blurred from my memory by the narrative force of this woman’s story.

“So what happened next?” I asked as the plane’s engines entered reverse thrust mode and our forward progress began to slow.

“What happened? I was in hospital for a week. During that time several Bundesrepublik functionaries visited me and, with great ease, facilitated my passage into their country. I asked several of them if they had any news of Florian Fallada. One of them actually wrote his name down and promised me that when she returned to see me again in several days’ time she would have some news for me.

“When she did come back, she had with her my Bundesrepublik identity card and the following information: no one by the name of Florian Fallada was registered as having crossed the frontier before it was sealed on thirteen August 1961.”

“And do you know what happened to Florian?” I asked, sounding a little too eager, like a reader who—having been plunged deep into a story—wanted to skip a hundred or so pages to find out what happened next.

“I had no word of him for over ten years,” the woman said. “Myself, I found a job in Frankfurt in the hotel business—and within ten years was married and divorced. I also became the sales director of Intercontinental Hotels in Germany. During the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1972, I returned to my former country on business. And although he wasn’t there the only newspaper available at my hotel was the Communist Party rag,
Neues Deutschland
. On the masthead, whom did I discover was the new editor in chief? Florian Fallada.”

The plane had come to a halt. Snow was falling outside. Steps were being pushed toward the forward door of the aircraft.

“And you never tried to contact him? Never tried to find out what happened to him when he didn’t cross over with you?”

She looked at me as if I was the most naïve man in the world.

“Had I contacted Florian I would have destroyed his career. And as I did rather love him . . .”

“But surely you wanted to know why he didn’t make it over?”

Again she regarded me with a sort of amused skepticism.

“Florian didn’t make it over because the ladder broke. Perhaps he didn’t have enough time to find another rope to get him down into no-man’s-land. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to leave his daughter behind. Perhaps he simply decided that he had a duty to remain in the place he called home, despite all the limitations that decision imposed. Who knows? But that secret—the secret that he was minutes away from escaping—stayed with only one other person: me.

“But now you know that secret, too. And perhaps you are wondering why this stranger—this middle-aged woman who is smoking and talking far too much—decided to tell you, Mr. Young American Writer, this very private story? Because I read today in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
that Florian Fallada, the editor in chief of
Neues Deutschland,
dropped dead two days ago of a heart attack at his office in East Berlin. And now, I say good-bye to you.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“My name is my business. But I’ve given you a good story,
ja
? You’ll find many stories here. The conundrum for you will be discerning which tales are true, and which are built on sand.”

A telltale
bing
was played over the loudspeaker system. Everyone began to stand up and ready themselves for the world beyond here. I hoisted my typewriter while putting my army greatcoat back on me.

“Let me guess,” the woman said. “Your father acts as if he doesn’t approve of you, but brags behind your back about His Son, the Writer.”

“My father lives his own life,” I said.

“And you will never get him to appreciate yours. So don’t bother. You’re young. Everything is still a tabula rasa. Lose yourself in other people’s stories and gain perspective on your own.”

With that, she nodded good-bye to me, heading off back into her own life. But once we were inside the terminal building—and waiting by the luggage carousel for our bags—she caught sight of me again and said:

“Willkommen in Berlin.”

TWO

K
REUZBERG.

The woman on the plane fell from a ladder in the East Berlin district of Friedrichshain and then staggered the thirty yards or so into Kreuzberg. Whereupon a Turkish gentleman came across her, crumpled in the street, writhing in pain. Within hours of this one small incident, the terrain she had just crossed became the most contentious border on the planet.

Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg. Just steps.

Until a wall is put up. And the steps become impossibilities.

On my third morning in Berlin I took the U-Bahn to Moritzplatz and found myself looking at the border crossing that now existed at Heinrich Heine Strasse. Heinrich Heine. I’d read him in college. One of the patron saints of German Romanticism—and now the name of the principal border crossings between East and West. No doubt, the GDR authorities latched onto Heine’s antibourgeois poems as proof of his impeccable “workers of the world unite” credentials. No doubt, there were those in the West who simply looked upon him as one of those flighty nineteenth-century literary personages whose work was largely divorced from quotidian realities and, as such, had to be dismissed as the height of bourgeois narcissism. Whatever the interpretation, when I came upon the Heinrich Heine Checkpoint, all I could think was—as it was for him in life, so it continues one hundred and twenty-eight years after his death. For he remains a writer who traversed the contradictions of the German consciousness—and, as such, deserved to belong to both sides of this now-divided land.

However, upon arriving in Berlin three days earlier I was geographically far away from Heinrich Heine Strasse, as I’d taken up temporary residence in a pension off the Ku’damm . . . right in the heart of an elegant square called Savignyplatz. The place was recommended in a “Berlin on the Cheap” guidebook I’d found in New York. It was a small, immaculate bed-and-breakfast place with rooms for forty deutsche marks a night—which, in 1984, worked out at around $12—affordable for a week or so, but not a long-term prospect for a writer with a small advance, working on a tight budget. Facing the green leafy plaza that was Savignyplatz, the Pension Weisse was a soft landing into Berlin. My room—with its firm single bed, its simple, Scandinavian-style furniture, its spotless en-suite bathroom, its ample heating, its spacious desk upon which I parked my typewriter, its soundproof windows—was a delight. I was punch-drunk after thirteen hours of travel via New York and Frankfurt, but the matron at the reception desk—none other than Frau Weisse—immediately endeared herself to me by letting me have access to the room a full three hours before check-in time.

“I have given you a room with a very nice view,” she told me. “And knowing you were arriving today we turned up the heating in it early this morning. Berlin has been arctic for days. Please do not risk frostbite and venture outside. I would hate to have to rush you to hospital on your second day here.”

Of course, I did venture outside—around three hours later when the wind and the blowing snow subsided. I made it out to the newspaper kiosk right next to the Savignyplatz S-Bahn station where I bought an
International Herald Tribune,
a packet of Drum rolling tobacco and cigarette papers, and a half-bottle of Asbach Uralt brandy (the idea of buying alcohol at a newspaper shop always pleased me). I then ducked into a pasta place. I ate a bowl of spaghetti carbonara, washed back with a glass of rough red wine. I read the newspaper and smoked several roll-up cigarettes with two espressos. I studied my fellow clientele. They were divided into two groups. There were businesspeople in suits who worked in the offices that lined the nearby Kurfürstendamm. There were also—judging from such standard-issue urban art house gear as their leather jackets, their black turtlenecks, their Bertolt Brecht eyeglasses and their packets of Gitanes—well-heeled members of the creative classes. I’d no doubt these were the sort of people who spoke the same
lingua franca
in which all cultured metropolitan people were fluent. And after lunch—when I was able to manage twenty minutes out of doors before the cold sent me back to my room—my walk around the quarter brought me past the elegant left-behinds of nineteenth-century burgher apartment blocks, and expensive, amply stocked local delicatessens, and fashionable clothing boutiques, and excellent bookshops and emporiums of classical music. The result of this hurried arctic dance around these well-heeled streets was to inform me that I had landed myself in one of West Berlin’s most pleasing neighborhoods. Coupled with the ease and comfort of the Pension Weisse, it was clear to me that I would have to get out of here fast. I wanted to write a book that reflected the edgy rhythms of this edgy city. But how could I simply commute into such edginess, then return home to an area that exuded the good life? I needed to wash up in a tough part of town.

Perhaps the reason I was already getting so absorbed with the question of “residence”—when I hadn’t even begun to work out the basic geography of the city—had to do with the book I was reading right now. With the blowing snow and the cold keeping me largely indoors, I spent much of the first few days in my room, listening to jazz on some local station and enveloped in a Christa Wolf novel,
The Quest for Christa T
. What intrigued me most about it was that—though the author was a much celebrated and sanctioned writer in the GDR—the novel was in no way an “official” East German text. Rather, that this tale of an essentially decent, commonplace woman living a decent, commonplace life in East Germany was mired in quiet desperation. As such it was a novel in which so much was left unsaid. As you read it you could begin to discern its subtext: the fact that it spoke about the oppressiveness of uniformity in a society that demanded absolute obedience. Its theme was the subjugation of the individual. But the way it stated its theme,
by never stating its theme,
both fascinated and unnerved me. Because it made me wonder:
Will I ever get a handle on this place? Have I arrived in a landscape where everything is not what it seems, where the divisions, the isolation, the geopolitical schizophrenia, run so deep and are so multilayered that I will never be able to penetrate its many skins, the cloaks behind which it veils itself?

In this sense I was suffering from a writerly form of stage fright. Doubt—that great monolith that frequently positions itself in front of all of us—had arrived. Though I knew there was an irrational aspect to such doubt—that I was panicking even before I had begun to really nose around the city—it was only years (and five books) later that I came to discover this was all part of the process by which one of my travel books was written. So, on these first days in Berlin, I began the daily grind of keeping a journal. I’d arrived here with eight old-style school notebooks—the ones with laminated black-and-white cardboard covers. I’d written in them throughout prep school and college. They also came with me to Egypt. I so liked writing in these books. They brought me back to hours spent in home rooms and lecture theaters, doodling my own thoughts as I listened to some professorial type spouting off. As a result, they became an essential part of what little I packed with me whenever I traveled. I was just a little obsessive when it came to guarding their safety. My notebooks never left the hotel or the room where I was billeted at a given time. Anytime I was outside said room, I had a small pocket-sized jotter with me. Whenever I returned back to the place I was sleeping I would immediately begin to write down, in narrative form, all that happened to me that day—including as much dialogue as I could remember.

This tedious task became an essential discipline. I simply had to keep writing. For I worried often that if I didn’t keep up with the story it would slip away from me.

My first two indoor days in Berlin didn’t give me much in the way of material. And I decided, on the third night, that I would ignore all the advice given me by Frau Weisse to stay off the frostbite-inducing streets. So I did venture out that evening, daring to walk the two miles from Savignyplatz to Potsdamer Platz and the Philharmonie. The snow that had blanketed the city for the past seventy-two hours had stopped, but the wind remained polar. After traversing the bright lights of the Kurfürstendamm—with its illuminated department stores and modern office buildings, its air of mercantile buzz—I began to regret my decision to sludge through the ferocious cold, especially as I was heading to the Philharmonie ticketless. The concert was long since sold out. Even Frau Weisse, who seemed to have connections everywhere, couldn’t pull the necessary strings to get me a single seat.

“This is always a problem when von Karajan is conducting. But maybe if you get there early there will be a return.”

It took me almost an hour to wend my way to the Philharmonie. But before I got there I walked around what was left of Potsdamer Platz—it so looked like an abandoned no-man’s-land—and got my first hard look at The Wall. Touching it with my gloved hand only seemed to magnify its hardness, its impregnability, its profound ugliness. In the distance I could see, on the Western side, the bright lights of a vertiginous office building, defiantly profit-oriented and looming. Axel Springer’s publishing empire was based here. Looking up at what appeared to be a newsroom on a high floor, all I could think was: the people on the other side of the divide were able to stare up at journalists at work in a country not their own, and to which they were forbidden to travel. Meanwhile, the journalists working above them in the West had, no doubt, a clear view over the no-man’s-land that separated The Wall from the actual streets of East Berlin. Were they able to see the trip wires, the guard dogs, the armed sentries who were under orders to shoot to kill if the fleeing citizen didn’t give himself up? Or did they come to regard this high-rise view as uninteresting? Was that the inherent dichotomy of an infamous structure like this one? To the newcomer like myself, its blank, solidified reality gripped my imagination. As a child of the Cold War I also couldn’t help but think:
I’m actually staring at the Berlin Wall!
But if you lived and worked by it, did you come to regard it as just part of the urban scenery, a prosaic fact of life?

The cold forced me to move on. With my head down to the wind I walked the ten minutes to the Philharmonie. I arrived there just a few minutes before the start of the concert and got immediately lucky, as there was a woman standing out front, holding up a spare ticket. It was a very good ticket—and, at 130 deutsche marks, way beyond my budget. But there are moments when extravagance is no bad thing—such as the opportunity to hear von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic play the
Ninth Symphony
of Gustav Mahler. So I put aside my budgetary concerns and snapped up the ticket, rushing inside.

The house lights were fading as I fell into my seat. The concert platform was now bathed in a yellow glow, the orchestra and the audience silent, waiting. A simple sculptural object was positioned center stage—a curved steel stand. A side door opened—and the figure of Herbert von Karajan appeared. He was seventy-six at the time. Though hunched and stooped—his face granitic and stern, his hair as white and stiff as a frozen blizzard—what was so immediately apparent was his defiance in the midst of the ravages of age. Though his spine was failing him, he still insisted on comporting himself like a man who had spent his life facing the world with a ramrod-straight demeanor, and was still determined to maintain his patrician hauteur. His progress to the front of the orchestra was slow but still majestic. He acknowledged the voluminous applause from the sold-out hall, then grasped the hand of the first violinist and favored the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic with a grave, knowing nod. As he positioned himself on that sculpted stand, his back now absolutely rigid, his shoulders held high, the physical effort of simply getting onto the concert platform was now replaced by an imperial bearing. He raised his head, letting both the orchestra and the audience know that he was ready. The hall fell silent and von Karajan held the silence for a good half-minute, forcing us to divest ourselves of all peripheral white noise and simply listen to the hall’s immense quiet. Then he raised his baton and made the smallest of gestures, indicating a downbeat. One of the double basses played a low pizzicato note, underscored by a tremolo on a French horn, and then came the emergence of a theme that was so plaintive, so full of
tristesse,
that it felt almost like a melancholic remembrance of things past. Then again, this symphony—Mahler’s
Ninth
and the last one he was to complete before his shockingly premature death at the age of fifty-one—was very much an extended premonition about encroaching mortality. Over the next ninety minutes Mahler engaged us in a sort of existential summing up of what it means to have lived a life: all the aspirations, all the passions, all the setbacks, the reversals of fortunes, the love that came and went. But, most of all, there was this sense of time’s rapid diminishment, how we are helpless in the face of its relentlessness, and the way, at the end of every individual narrative, there is the fade to black that is death.

Throughout the symphony’s duration I couldn’t take my eyes off von Karajan. Whatever about the curvature of his spine, once positioned on that stand, once deep into the vast musical architecture of that symphony, he was nothing less than mesmeric. Even in the symphony’s final pages—when it was clear that, through Mahler, von Karajan was also rendering a profound reflection on the inescapability of human mortality—I couldn’t help but feel that he was also letting it be known he would not surrender easily to eternal darkness. When the final strings faded away, he held the silence for a good minute—his arms aloft, his head bowed, the immensity of that final moment—the heartbeat now forever stilled—enfolding all present.