When We Danced on Water (8 page)

Chapter 14

M
artin's hair, when she had last seen him, was thick and wavy and sandy brown. Had he brushed it downward instead of curling the ends behind his ears, it would have reached halfway to his shoulders. Now, however, it was cut close to the scalp and shockingly blond. A bigger surprise still was his face, once obscured by a thin, wispy beard and now smooth-shaven. How round and open it was. He looked slightly stuffed and padded, though he did not seem to have gained weight in his body.

Martin lived in a second-floor flat of what had once been a grand mansion—now subdivided and rented to negligent students—near the Grunewald train station in the British sector of West Berlin. An old wrought-iron gate gave way to a shabby, untended garden. Various entrances to the separate apartments had been knocked through the outer walls, giving the entire structure the look of a large mouth missing teeth in several crucial places. The apartment was tiny, but the high ceiling and a verandah, which afforded views of leafy, healthy old trees in the garden, gave Vivi a sense of space that the room did not.

In the first days following her arrival in Berlin Martin took time from work and university to show her the city, introduce her to friends. Berlin seemed to be filled with students; in some neighborhoods nobody appeared to be older than twenty-five. Many, like Martin, had come to West Berlin from other parts of Germany for its special status as an occupied city, meaning that Berlin residents were not required to serve in the German army. He brought Vivi to the local greengrocer, to the bank, to the post office. He invited her to all the popular hangouts: Die Ruine, Café Einstein, Terzo Mondo, and especially to Zweiblfisch, an easy train ride away, where the intellectuals debated anything and everything all night, to dawn. Vivi clung to Martin, awed and fearful, worried how she would manage on her own when Martin returned to his schedule. He taught her words she would need to know and was generally solicitous and quite glad to have her with him. They made love often, though at Vivi's insistence it was usually in the dark.

Before leaving Israel Vivi had had trouble picturing her life in Berlin, what she would spend her days doing, but had been generally excited to be in Europe, with so much culture and history lying around like a field studded with precious gems waiting to be collected. What she had not counted on, however, was the isolation of Berlin, a city—not even a city but a half city—that was a geographical dead-end, a cul-de-sac. Whereas in Israel she had sometimes felt hemmed in by troubled borders too close for comfort, here in Berlin she felt absolutely threatened, and had frequent nightmares in which she was constantly, accidentally, stepping across the border into East Germany and getting shot or beaten or imprisoned.

As a foreigner with no official status, Vivi was forbidden from working or studying, so after a month of settling in to Martin's routines, after recovering from her initial shock and fear, she began to explore Berlin. She walked the Tiergarten, the Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, the Zoologischer Garten, the Fritz-Schloss Park. She walked the grand boulevards and the small side streets. She visited the museums, the churches, the concert halls. She spent one whole week in the newly remodeled KaDeWe department store, a day on each floor testing perfumes, sampling cheeses, watching television broadcasts in the electronics section. Even halved it was a huge city, but she walked Berlin tirelessly, in ever-expanding concentric circles. On sunny days she prowled the parks and on rainy ones the museums or the shops. Mostly, on these long days of rambling energy, she spoke to no one, other than a quick request for coffee in a café or a ticket at a museum. Sometimes, however, she was approached, usually by men. They talked of the weather or commented on her brisk walk, all the while a smile on their rosy-cheeked faces. But their eyes would always drop downward, stopping at her chest, her hips. She quickly learned to cut off these aimless conversations before their eyes could wander.

In the evenings she was eager for conversation, real human interaction, and wished to recount the events of her day to Martin. Martin, fatigued from medical studies and a day job in a hospital lab, wished for study time in the evenings, hoping to dispense with conversation over dinner. Vivi found this intolerable, and looked for ways to provoke his anger in order to coax him into talking to her.

“I spent the day in the portrait gallery of the National Museum today,” she told him. “All those pale inbred aristocrats. I thought they were so
ugly
. Then afterward, on the street outside, I kept running into them. They're all over the place, haven't changed a bit!”

Martin grinned but did not look up from his books.

Vivi made a great, noisy show of scraping and stacking the glass dishes. “Then I stopped back in KaDeWe for a pair of socks and wound up buying four sweaters and a new winter coat.”

“Hmmm,” he said absentmindedly.

“Then I had sex with the bear keeper and one of the bears at the Tiergarten Zoo.”

“Which did you prefer?” he asked, without looking up.

She threw a dishtowel at him.

“Martin,” she screamed. “I'm bored and miserable!”

Martin slipped a bookmark between the pages and closed his book. He stood, stretched and approached Vivi, taking her into his arms so that her cheek pressed against his chest. “I know, darling, I know. Tomorrow night I'll take you out dancing, or to a film. Would you like to see a film?”

She listened to his voice as it reached her both from his mouth and from the deep rumble in his chest. She put her arms around his middle. “I miss you,” she said softly.

Despite the tremendous size of the city, even just her half, Vivi had exhausted the museums and parks of West Berlin in a matter of weeks. The weather turned cold; her lips chapped and her skin grew dry. Her concentric circles shrank and she stayed closer to home, but still she spent hours outside the house every day.

Vivi found herself drawn eastward, toward the wall and the city that lay beyond. Through November and December her outings always started off the same way, with a ride on the 129 bus to Potsdamer-strasse or Friedrichstrasse, both close to the wall. Some days she would walk the wall north, to where the Reichstag sat on the river, other days south and eastward through Kreuzberg, where once again she met the River Spree. Always, she kept to the wall for as long as she could before a biting wind or a freezing snowfall pushed her home. Often she would choose a spot and simply stare up at the wall, learning its structure, imagining scaling it, wondering if there were a Vivi standing just across from her on the other side contemplating all the same things. At night she was full of questions.

“When exactly was it built?” she would ask Martin, who was sprawled on the mattress reading a medical textbook.

“
Neunzehnhunderteinundsechzig
.” He could never come up with numbers quickly in any language but German and had long since abandoned Hebrew for English as their mode of communication.

Vivi paused to calculate. “
Sheeshim v'echad
. That's 1961. So what was happening until then? I mean, from the end of the war, did people just move back and forth or what?”

“Aaarrghhh,” said Martin, slamming shut his textbook. Vivi was certain she had derailed him and he would be angry. “I hate studying all these diseases, I learn the symptoms and start to imagine I have them.” He stood up from the bed and yawned, then turned his attention to Vivi. “What were you asking me?”

“About the wall. About Berlin before the wall.”

“Ja, there were checkpoints and you needed an
Interzonenpass
to get around. It was far easier for Westerners to pass to the East than vice versa. The East Berliners wanted the exotic fruits we had in the markets, the women wanted seamless stockings. That's why the Soviets built the wall.”

Vivi thought about the KaDeWe department store, how close and tantalizing it must have seemed to the Germans east of the wall, and yet how impossibly distant. Like a high window to a blue sky in a prison cell.

“The signs,” she said to Martin. “There are so many different signs and I'm always trying to understand them: ‘
Verursacht durch die Schandsperre
,' ” she quoted.

“ ‘This now dead-end street,' ” he translated, “ ‘is the result of the barrier of shame.' ”

“Ah,” she said. “And, ‘
Sektoren-Grenze in Gawässer Mitte
,' what does that one mean?”

Martin smiled. “That the border is in the middle of the lake or canal or river.”

“Oh yes,” she says, “I've seen buoys floating in the water marked GDR or FRG. It's absurd!”

“It's absurd, yes, but it's the only logical solution for now.”

She had heard him debate this at length at Zweiblfisch many times and had no desire to hear his arguments again. She had more questions, she was bubbling over with questions about the wall, but Martin had crossed the room and was pulling her to him. He wrapped her inside himself, hugged her with heavy arms.

One morning well into January, as she stood gazing upward at a corner in the wall where Kommandantenstrasse met Springerstrasse, a tiny man appeared at her elbow from nowhere. “
Fünfundvierzig tausend
,” he said.

Vivi was too startled and too curious to be afraid. She knew he had said a number but she could not figure which one, nor what it had to do with anything.

“Forty-five thousand,” he repeated in English. “The wall is made up of forty-five thousand of these segments, each one 3.6 meters tall and 1.2 meters wide. They've been rebuilt and refurbished four times, most recently in 1975. It seems they'll be here for a very long time.”

“What are they made of?” she asked, immediately at ease with this dwarf. In fact he looked quite powerful, in spite of his size, but she felt she could trust him.

“They're concrete slabs between steel girders and concrete posts, with concrete sewage pipes on the top,” he said in precise, rehearsed English. “The new segments put up in the last few years are supposed to be more resistant than ever to breakthroughs.”

She sized him up, trying to guess his age. “Can you tell me what it was like before they built the wall?” she asked.

“Certainly,” he said quickly, “for a hot chocolate with whipped cream in the café over there.”

Vivi did not glance over her shoulder to where he was pointing. “Lead the way,” she said, “it's a deal.”

Peter, he was called, or Hans-Peter if you insisted. He had been raised in Leipzig but had come to Berlin in the summer of 1961, when rumors of plans to seal off the West from the East were rife. He had tried to convince his aging mother to come with him but she insisted he go alone, and so he crossed quite undramatically into West Berlin and never saw her again. He told Vivi he had been twenty years old when he had crossed over, so she figured he was in his mid-forties by now.

“Lucky for me I wasn't born any earlier than I was,” he said, a whipped cream mustache foaming on his upper lip, “or the Nazis would have experimented on me for sure.” He looked down into his cup and Vivi thought he might start to cry. There was a teaspoon next to his mug but Peter preferred stirring his cocoa with his finger and sucking off the cream and the chocolate. Vivi found him highly amusing, and safe, like a grown-up child.

“What is it like in the East?” she asked, taking a sip of her own hot chocolate.

“Well I don't know anymore firsthand, of course, but I have a pretty good idea. Lots of parades and marches, power shortages, speeches. No good television—I love television!—no pineapples, no fancy clothes or sports cars. Lots of rationing.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if to inform her he had said all there was to say about East Germany. She waited for more but Peter was busy with the bun she had ordered.

With a mouthful of bread Peter said, “You walk a lot around here, along the wall, I've seen you. This area is my territory. Every once in a while someone manages to escape from the East into West Berlin and I am always hoping he'll drop down the wall right in my sector. I've had a few, two actually, a chap from Berlin and another from a tiny village near Leipzig. He spoke the same dialect as me, even knew my mother's little newsstand. He's married now, living in Spandau.” Peter drained his mug and licked the chocolatey rim. “I can show you around the neighborhood if you like.”

Vivi paid and the two were out in the street. The sun had come out and suddenly the ice and snow shone brightly in the light, blinding her. Peter seemed unaffected.

That day he showed her one small street in his territory, one small street that she might have happened past a dozen times and never noticed, for it was unremarkable in every way: a short and narrow lane of insignificant buildings that dead-ended at the wall. But Peter brought the street alive for the entirety of its seven-hundred-year existence. He told of princes who had slept or dueled there, merchants who had prospered and failed, a patrician family who had used their roof garden for several suicide jumps stretched over three generations. He told of East Germans who had plunged from the wall to the street, a single bullet through the neck. And he told of Jews, Jews tortured or beaten or chased.

Vivi was riveted. She stayed with Peter in the street until she could no longer feel her fingers or toes. She met him the next day, and the next. She learned his likes and dislikes, and took pains to pack lunches he might enjoy, since she could not afford to invite him for hot chocolate and buns every day of the week.

Peter showed her the real Berlin and its ghost. He pointed out where the jazz clubs had flourished, where prostitutes and pimps had gathered. Together they stood at the site of Europe's first traffic light, in Potsdamer Platz, or they trekked paths that pursued and frightened Berliners had used to stay clear of the marauding Soviets at the end of the war. Peter taught Vivi to see Berlin in layers, like a woman with countless rustling petticoats, each concealing secrets large and small. He was clearly both in love with and appalled by his adopted city.