The Moment (14 page)

And I knew from photographs that Alexanderplatz had been largely leveled in the last war. Just as I also knew that the East Germans had chosen to build an iconic symbol—a looming television tower—right in the center of the bomb site. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the way they had also turned the entire area into a bleak high-rise ghetto. Concrete canyons. Bleak apartment blocks. Empty shopping precincts. No color. No vegetation. No sense of anything geared toward making this urban landscape livable, tolerable.

I ducked into a café just opposite the Alexanderplatz tram stop. It was all linoleum and lit by fluorescent tubes. There was a lingering smell of grease and overcooked cabbage. I sat down at one of the tables. A lone woman—big hipped, an overplump face, her hair in curlers—was behind the counter.

“
Ja?
” she asked tonelessly.

“Coffee, please,” I said.

As I waited for it to arrive, I took out my notebook and started jotting down all that had happened to me in the hours since crossing Checkpoint Charlie. I also fished out a Marlboro and lit it up.

“Can I have one, too?” came a voice from a corner of the café.

I looked over and saw a guy around my own age, sitting in a corner. His complexion was copper colored, he had close-cropped black hair, he was wearing a distressed brown leather jacket and the sort of jeans that had been so bleached they were a mishmash of blue denim and white rivulets. He had a packet of f6 cigarettes and a cup of coffee on the table in front of him.

“Help yourself,” I said, tossing the pack of cigarettes over to him.

He caught the pack and fished one out, immediately lighting it up.

“We can buy Marlboro back in Luanda,” he said, his German decent, if heavily accented (like my own).

“You’re Angolan?” I asked.

“That’s right. How did you know Luanda? You’ve been there?”

“Not yet. But I like reading maps. So what are you doing here in East Berlin?”

“Sitting in this café and bothering people, as always.”

This was the voice of the woman behind the counter as she came toward me with my cup of coffee, adding:

“I always tell him I don’t want his kind in here, but he keeps coming back.”

“He’s not bothering me,” I said. “And explain what you mean when you say ‘his kind.’”

The woman glared at me, shoving the coffee in front of me and causing some of it to spill over into the saucer.

“Thirty pfennigs,” she said.

“Cigarette?” I asked, proffering the pack of Marlboros. She instantly took one and stormed off into the kitchen behind the counter.

“She hates me,” the guy said.

“I’d say she hates everyone.”

“You’ve got that one right,” he said. “Can I . . . ?”

He motioned to the seat next to mine.

“Of course.”

I now made the mistake of sipping the coffee. It was the color of light brown urine. The taste was commensurate.

“You’re American?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“You over on a day pass?”

“Something like that.”

“West Berlin must be cool.”

“Haven’t you been over there?”

“Not allowed.”

“But surely, as you’re not East German . . .”

“Part of the deal with my scholarship. They won’t let me leave the country, except to go home to Luanda. And as my course is three years long . . .”

“What are you studying?”

“Chemical engineering.”

“Is the course good here?”

“The professors know what they are talking about. The rest of the students . . . I have no friends, except two other Angolans. Before I came here, I was told the German Democratic Republic loves Africans from ‘fraternal socialist countries.’ The women will throw themselves at you. The truth: I show up here and everyone acts as if I don’t exist. I want to go back to Luanda—but my father tells me his standing in the Party back home will be undermined if I quit now. I want to get a visa for West Germany, but my two Angolan friends here told me we are watched all the time. Anyway, the East German border guards have instructions to turn us back if we ever try to approach a border crossing. That’s the thing about being a citizen of a ‘fraternal socialist country.’ You are as entrapped here as everybody else. At least, back home, I am among my own people. And the sun is in the sky most of the year. Here . . . it’s all dark.”

He said this all in a low voice, the woman, who had re-emerged from the kitchen glaring at us from behind the counter, trying to see if she could discern what he was saying. Why he had chosen me to impart this information so suddenly and freely was evident. Like the person you meet sitting next to you on a plane who unloads onto you his darkest secret and you realize that (1) he has a burning need to articulate that which is gnawing at him constantly; and (2) he knows you are completely outside his realm of contact, let alone someone with a degree of influence or power over his life. Were he to get friendly with a German classmate at his university here and inform him what he truly felt about life in East Berlin he could find himself next talking with the Stasi and representatives of his embassy. But a complete stranger and one who he had established is an American over on a Cinderella visa? I was the ideal candidate, especially as I had a packet of Marlboros on the table in front of me.

“Mind if I . . . ?” he asked, pointing to the pack.

“Go ahead. Why don’t you keep them?”

He looked genuinely surprised.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The woman behind the counter scowled some more.

“She will tell someone about this. I live across the street. I usually come in here for coffee, even though the coffee is shit. But it’s the only place to have coffee around here. But I know she will now report me for speaking with a foreigner. Maybe, if I get lucky, they will deport me.”

He stood up, scooping up the pack of cigarettes.

“Thanks for the Marlboros.”

And he was gone.

Once he was outside the door, I returned to my notebook, letting the terrible coffee go cold, occasionally glancing at the woman behind the counter. She was sitting on a stool next to the fridge, smoking and staring blankly up at the yellowed and mold-ridden ceiling tiles. Her eyes were heavy, her expression one of blank exhaustion, a visual expression for which the Germans have a word:
weltschmerz.
World-weariness. How I wanted to know what was eating her. A bad marriage? No man in her life? A divorce, and a new boyfriend who drank too much and occasionally lashed out with his fists? Loneliness? The futility of this job, with no further horizons beyond this café, this city, this highly regulated society? A sense that, in the great time-space continuum, what did someone who worked in an Alexanderplatz café leave behind? (Then again, unless we were that once-in-a-generation shape shifter of the human landscape, what did any of us leave behind?) Or, perhaps, just perhaps, I was being far too absurdly existential here. Perhaps she was just having a bad day. So I asked her just that.

“Bad day?”

Though she clearly heard me she didn’t turn her gaze away from the ceiling tiles. And her reply was nothing more than a simple shrug. I gathered up my things and, with a simple
Auf Wiedersehen
, headed toward the door.

“Could I have another cigarette?” the woman asked.

I came over and put my spare pack of Marlboros in her hand.

“Keep them,” I said.

“Not necessary,” she said, handing them back to me. “Just one cigarette. That’s all.”

I opened the pack. She pulled out a single Marlboro and acknowledged her thanks with a small nod. Then, placing it behind her ear, she stared up again at the overhead tiles. The interaction was finished. I had to hit the street.

I spent much of the remaining afternoon walking around two districts: Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Proper neighborhoods with an interesting architectural stock. The Allied bombs had also spared much here. Though nearly four decades of civic indifference to their upkeep had left most of them in a blistered, shabby state, the apartment buildings and houses here were built on a nineteenth-century human scale. Unlike the faceless Stalinist blocks that so defined Alexanderplatz and environs, here there was a sense of ordinary life not subservient to the state. Yes, everything needed a paint job. Yes, the paucity of goods for sale in the few corner shops I passed was striking. But in Kollwitzplatz, in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, there was a small park and playground, in which mothers pushed children in swings and sat on benches, smoking and gossiping. It didn’t matter that their clothes matched the grayness of the cityscape, or that the playground equipment was, at best, austere. And it didn’t matter that there was a huge billboard on the side of a building, exhorting the people to embrace the Five-Year Plan and featuring a Socialist Realist portrait of the longtime head of state, Erich Honecker, a man whose thick black glasses and drab silver hair and plain dull countenance gave him the look of a merciless tax inspector.

No, what mattered here were children running around and mothers talking among themselves. It reminded me that, whatever about the stark surface realities of East Berlin, the reassuringly humdrum still asserted itself here. There were meals to be prepared, beds to be made, children to be dropped off at school, buses and trams to be taken to work, jobs to do, the commute home, the dinner that night, the book or television or maybe even some external divertissement (a film, play, concert) to chew up the evening, and then bed—and perhaps the pleasures (or, for some, the torments) of sex, followed by whatever sound or broken sleep to which you were accustomed. The accumulation of days like these—with their rarely deviating routines—so constitutes, for the vast majority of us, the broad outlines of our sentient existence. The happy couple, the bad marriage, the profession that excites, the employment that stultifies, the intimacy that is transcendent, the intimacy that is pedestrian or nonexistent . . . all such pleasures and dilemmas, the entire spectrum of human experience, exist in all social landscapes, whether they are walled in or not.

As night began to fall, I found a dingy little restaurant off Kollwitzplatz—which, like the café I patronized earlier, was all linoleum and fluorescent tubing. There was a smell of boiled cabbage everywhere. I drank two shots of Polish vodka (very agreeable). I ordered a schnitzel, which was heavily coated in batter and largely tasteless. I washed it down with two bottles of local beer. Very drinkable—and when combined with the two preceding vodkas, germinating a nice buzz. The entire cost of the booze and the bad food was one mark fifty. I checked my watch. It was now eight. I walked back to Prenzlauer Alle and caught a tram to Alexanderplatz, changing for the U-Bahn that stopped at Stadtmitte. Had this been a unified city, the station following this one would have been Kochstrasse. But the East Berlin U-Bahn system dead-ended at Stadtmitte. There was nowhere to go now but up onto the street—which, as before, was Friedrichstrasse. Again I turned and faced west—and saw the gates of Checkpoint Charlie in the very near distance. I wondered where I could go next. But East Berlin at this hour seemed shuttered, closed down for the night. I knew I would return here soon again and go to the opera or a play at the Berliner Ensemble or find my way to a jazz joint, and see if I could penetrate the city’s inaccessibility a little further. But with a heavy snow now falling—and nowhere now to go on this side of The Wall—I continued to sludge westward toward the checkpoint. By the time I reached it I was frozen. I was the only customer at the frontier. A guard emerged out of the little hut located next to the barricade and raised the arm that allowed me to enter the customs area. Even on this blizzard of a night I noted the three heavily armed soldiers standing out in the cold, eyeing me carefully as I walked into the customs booth.

I handed over my passport to the uniformed official in the customs booth.

“Are you carrying anything contraband on you?” he asked.

Do I look that crazy?
I felt like asking him. But instead I just shook my head and said:

“No, sir.”

“You bought nothing?”

What’s to buy
?

“No, sir.”

He scanned my face, trying to see if I was in any way nervous or anxious. I was just cold. Then, inking his stamp, he brought it down on my passport. Handing it back to me he said:

“Auf Wiedersehen.”

I nodded back. Passport still in hand, I passed through the final two security checkpoints before reaching the big gate that fronted the “American Sector.” Once there, I noted that there were three guards on duty: one to make a final verification of my exit visa and open the gate, the other two (I surmised) to watch their colleague as he let me out. Was this how they guaranteed no flights over the border by those guarding the border? Was everyone, in some way or another, watching each other and, as such, ensuring that they all remained within?