The Berlin Crossing (3 page)

And as I nursed the old Trabi out of my old school for the last time, I nursed my wounded bitterness in the clattering comfort
of its noisy engine. Just who did Dr Wilhelm Frick think he was, to despise me for my loyalty to a fallen flag? Must I, like
so many of my former countrymen, dispose of my Trabi just as I had disposed of my country – or as others had disposed of it
for me? True, my part-time job at the Police Academy had enabled me to jump the long waiting list for our national motor car
but that was no crime: allegiance brought its own rewards. Dr bloody Frick and his fellow carpetbaggers were the living proof
of that. Nearly every block and building in Brandenburg was under new ownership and – if the tide of rumours held even a grain
of truth – the bricks and mortar of our town had been bought for a proverbial song.

And now Michael Ritter, PhD, could sing his own proverbial song for his supper. But what proverb, I mused, the engine idling
noisily as I waited for the tram to pass and let me cross the Hauptstrasse, could comfort me?
Faraway hills are green:
but which hills, far or near, would welcome a former Party member?
The early bird catches the worm:
but I was the worm, swallowed whole by the invading bird. Or better still,
It’s an ill wind that blows no good:
the country that had shaped me had blown apart in the storm – and the Fricks of the West had swooped like vultures to gorge
on the carcass.

Watch the mixed metaphors, I told myself, easing over the tramlines into Kurstrasse. I used to tell my English students the
same thing – that, and a lot of other things – but that was no longer my concern. Nor was the identity of my successor, that
unknown teacher who, from tomorrow morning, would be taking over my classes. And yes, I liked my job, I liked my students,
and I’d miss them, especially the group of seniors that I had taken to the brink of the final examination, the
Abitur
. As of tomorrow
morning, that responsibility was someone else’s.

As of now, Michael Ritter
, I reminded myself. All things change. Look at the shops on the street. The pharmacy. The supermarket. The banks. The video
store. Even Beate Uhse with its garish window full of scarlet knickers and lacy bras. All things change. Like the Soviet war
cemetery at the end of the street, once abloom with flowers but now the litter-laden, syringe-strewn hangout of the winos
and addicts who have mushroomed in our reunified streets.

All things change, I reminded myself again, as I swung left, heading towards the railway station and, opposite it, the block
of flats where I lived with my mother.

Or maybe I should say: where my mother lived and where, in my thirtieth year, I had gone back to live with her.

Or: where my mother was dying and I was waiting for her to die.

I owed her that much, to wait with her for the end. We’d had a difficult relationship: from my earliest days I’d been confused
by my mother’s wildly swinging moods – there were days when she clung to me, as if my going out of the door of our apartment
to school must wound her, like a knife to her heart, but there were other days when that same knife was pointed at me, as
if she could not bear to look at me even for another moment. It’s not easy, when you’re eight or nine years old and you don’t
know which mother will come home after work, the doting mum who smothers you with kisses or the alter ego whose baleful eyes
and words leave you in no doubt that your very existence is an affront to her.

And yet, I thought, easing the Trabi across the canal bridge between the shiny invaders, we had never given up on each other.
I’d tried to let go in my first years at Rostock – and maybe my mother had tried too: a whole term would pass without so much
as a line from either side and I’d haul my books and bags home reluctantly for each vacation and we’d resume our erratic pas
de deux in the fourth-floor apartment opposite the railway station. Just the two of us, smiling and snarling at each other
like a pair of puppets doomed forever to dance to their own discordant music. Just the two of us, like it had always been.

Now the nurse came, twice daily, morning and evening, with her syringes and phials of relief. These mornings I was waiting
for her, my mother’s moaning a grief too great as the night-time injection wore off and the pain took hold of her skeletal
body. More, I urged the nurse, why must she suffer so, and the nurse, bleary-eyed at six thirty in the morning, ignored my
entreaty and whispered women’s words to my mother as she lifted her gently and soothed her ashen face with a damp flannel.
She couldn’t stay, the nurse whispered to me, the new Agency Controller had just issued all the nurses with new schedules,
new timetables. ‘You know how it is now,’ she said sleepily. Because of my mother’s condition, the nurse’s visit could be
extended to fourteen minutes. Yes, I knew how it was. Targets must be achieved; my mother’s dying needs had to be disposed
of in fourteen minutes.

The apartment block rose up in front of me. Six storeys of grey cement, peeling windows and six metal doors fronting on to
a cracked strip of pathway and a balding patch of lawn. A central corridor ran the length of each floor, with flats to the
front and the rear. For the last month or so my mother had been unable to sit up and watch the trains coming and going, great
red beasts bound for Magdeburg or Berlin or points further afield. Now she lay on her nest of plumped-up pillows, mostly sleeping
until the pain stirred her, and I wondered if she could hear the trains below us, rattling their way on iron rails to places
that she would never see.

I could hear her raspy breathing the moment I stepped on to
our fourth-floor corridor. The door to our apartment was slightly ajar: Frau Mertens, our neighbour across the corridor, must
be with my mother.

When I eased the door fully open, I could see Frau Mertens through the open doorway of my mother’s bedroom. Her bulky body
slowly turned from my mother’s bed; I felt her eyes upon me, taking in the pair of cartons I was carrying, my old satchel
on top of them. She levered her heavy body from the chair and plodded towards me, flat-footed in bedroom slippers.

‘She’s having a hard time of it, God help her,’ she whispered. Frau Mertens was a Pole; God was a frequent figure in her conversation.

‘At least she’s sleeping.’

‘She is, thank God.’

‘It’s good of you to come,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how I’d manage without your help.’

‘Isn’t that what neighbours are for? Especially now, the way things are.’

I didn’t remind her that she’d been one of the mob lighting candles in St Katherine’s, aping the deviants in Leipzig, praying
for deliverance from the snares of the GDR. Anyway, Frau Mertens had her own troubles now, with the new Management Committee
(i.e. the new owners of our block) advising her that her apartment was too large for one person and that, if she refused to
move to a smaller home, ‘her position and tenancy, including rent, would have to be reviewed’.

‘Even so, Frau Mertens,’ I said, ‘I’m very grateful – without you . . .’ I shrugged. We both knew the truth of my words.

‘You’re home early.’ Her small eyes darted to my cartons of books; there was a question mark in her voice.

‘Change of plan,’ I said off-handedly, recognizing in her words the other Frau Mertens, the one who had made her husband’s
life
a misery, while he smoked and coughed his way to death on cheap tobacco, the woman you knew was listening behind her closed
door to your every move as a pimpled adolescent, the one who’d reported nearly every one of her neighbours to the Stasi (as
a ‘competent’ person, I’d seen the file of letters before the Wall came down) – and then the one who’d jumped on the candle-burning
bandwagon in the pews of St Katherine’s.

And yet Frau Mertens was not all of a piece: the care and attention she lavished upon my mother were both heartfelt and real.

‘I’ll sit with her now,’ I said. ‘You go home and rest.’

‘There’ll be time enough for rest, all in God’s own time.’ She looked back at my mother, her thin chest rising and falling
in time with the wheezy breathing. ‘I didn’t always understand your mother, Michael, but God knows she always did her best
for you.’

‘I didn’t always understand her myself.’

She smiled at that, her doughy features transformed almost into girlishness, and I felt her pudgy hand on my arm.

‘I have a stew made, Michael, I’ll bring you in a bit later on.’

‘No, it’s too much trouble—’

‘What trouble is it? Now go and sit with her – she was rambling a lot in her sleep, Michael this and Michael that – I don’t
think your mother has long to go now and you should be with her.’

I couldn’t speak, her words welling inside me in depths I had no wish to plumb. I watched Frau Mertens leave, black from head
to toe in her widow’s weeds, her squat body shuffling snail-like along the lino-covered floor, and it was not darkness that
left the room but a sense of light, the half-caught cadence of a waltz.

I fixed myself a cup of instant coffee after Frau Mertens left: that at least had improved under the new regime and, as the
Director had pointed out to me, my revised salary was ample for
the new goods that filled our newly appointed stores. ‘You have bananas now,’ our conquering fellow countrymen reminded us:
hunker down and peel the goodies we bring you. Like good little chimps.

‘How can you be so blind?’ my mother would rail, in the months after the mob stormed the Brandenburg Gate and stuck yellow
flowers into the soldiers’ rifles. ‘Can’t you see, Michi, that the world is changing, that we’re free to live our own lives
at last?’

‘Yes, free to live the lives dictated to us by Reagan and Thatcher, and the rest—’

‘Michi, you’re such a fool! Can’t you see the truth about the kind of life we’ve had here for the last forty years!’

On and on. Sniper fire across the breakfast table. Artillery salvoes on the bitter evenings when I came in from work. I didn’t
understand it. My mother had never offered a political opinion until the Wall came down.

When Kohl declared reunification there was a shift in her position. The field was hers, the banners of the enemy not merely
fallen but obliterated from the record. The only records that mattered now were the files from the Rathaus basement, the thousands
of letters that sometimes showed no more than the settling of neighbourly scores, the venting of personal spleens, but which,
in essence, were the vernacular and documented history of a society under siege. Under the new dispensation, concerned citizens
were shown in their allegedly true colours as traitors, oppressors, saboteurs. Traitors to what? To whom? They acted in the
best interests of the country that nurtured them, fed them, educated them. As I had done. Director Frick and his ilk could
point a finger, could accuse me of silence or even complicity and I could answer, truthfully, that sometimes for the greater
good, you had to close your eyes and hold your nose.

‘At least,’ my mother said, on the first anniversary of the fall of the Wall, ‘at least keep your opinions to yourself. You’ll
get yourself into trouble, sounding off the way you do.’

‘So dissent is a dirty word now, is it? I thought dissent was a cornerstone of the great democracies of the West!’

‘They’ll get rid of you if you shoot your mouth off like that at school. You know they’ll find you in the files,’ my mother
said. ‘For all I know, not just here in Brandenburg but even in Berlin.’ The stream of names from the Stasi headquarters was
threatening to become a torrent: if it went on, there’d be no honest citizen left to pass judgement on the rest of us . . . Although
the
Wessies
would always be there to help us see the error of our ways.

‘What can they do?’ I snorted. ‘Shoot me? Send me to Siberia?’

‘They can take your job away from you.’

‘So I’ll get another.’

I remembered the look she gave me: we both know, her eyes said, that you’re bluffing.

Steffi didn’t even argue about it: she just told me that she was divorcing me and that she wanted me out of the flat.

It didn’t, at first, seem such a big deal, going back to my mother’s; I’d been in the habit of calling in on her most evenings.
The move just meant that the skirmishes between my mother and myself had time to burgeon into proper battles.

I held her hand throughout the afternoon. A withered hand, black and blue from the umpteen needles that fed her the morphine.
The fingers slightly askew: I’d asked but she’d never told me how they’d been broken. Sometimes I stroked her hand, felt the
fleshless mortality of the wounded fingers, remembered, as through a mist, the touch of her hands in my hair, long ago, in
the days of boyhood. In the same room. In another country.

The trains came and went. Whistles from Hanover, echoes
from Rostock. Other places, cities on station boards. They were beyond her now, beyond the reach of her dying hands, her obstinate
will. I sat beside her deathbed and remembered her fierce pride in me, in my achievements at school, the cheap silver football
cups and medals that still shone, polished, on the ancient sideboard.

And yet, after the Wall came down, her attitude towards me seemed almost schizophrenic. Once I had overheard her boasting
to Frau Mertens about my appointment as a teacher in the very school I myself had attended; later she became openly critical
of the life that had led me there, my attachment to Party and country. We were growing apart. I knew, holding her poor punctured
hand, that soon we would reach the last parting.

It came sooner than any of us expected. Maybe it was the returning pain that roused her, the morphine’s edge blunting; maybe
it was the four o’clock from Berlin, pausing briefly on its way westward to Magdeburg. Or maybe it was just the knuckle of
death at the door of my mother’s heart reminding her that it was time to look her last on the life she had lived, time for
farewells.

I was leaning over her, wiping the spittle that leaked from the corners of her mouth, when she woke. The blue eyes blinked;
she frowned in pain. And then, for the first time in weeks, a smile lit up the hollows of her ravaged face – the kind of smile,
however momentary, that reminded you of the girl she had been, the young woman in the photograph on the sideboard, big-eyed
and blonde and staring confidently out at the world.