Erickson had been in Berlin two months and was eating dinner one night in a restaurant off the Ku’damm, when a couple of Berliners sitting at his table told him about the Tunneler.
A beautiful young American Marxist student went to East Berlin one weekend in 1977 and fell in love with an East German professor. She wound up defecting, marrying the professor, bearing his son, and becoming an East German citizen. Over the years the professor began to suspect, much to his horror, that his wife was informing on him for the Stasi, the East German secret police. He came to believe, moreover, that she’d been informing on him for some time, certainly since she had become a citizen of East Germany and perhaps before that; in fact, as he thought about it more and more, he eventually concluded that she’d been spying on him from the very beginning, that their initial meeting and love affair had been part of a Stasi plan all along. He was convinced that he’d been seduced in the name of the state and that the young American woman had never loved him at all and that even their little boy was part of the political scheme.
Perhaps this was true and perhaps it wasn’t. But clandestinely, with the knowledge of only his closest and most trusted friends, the professor entered a plot to escape to the West by underground tunnel near the barren Potsdamerplatz. One morning in the early spring of 1989 he rose from bed, washed and dressed himself, prepared his class papers and packed his briefcase, kissed his wife goodbye and held his ten-year-old son especially close to him, and left his house as he’d done hundreds of mornings over the years, never to be seen again.
A number of high-placed friends who knew of the professor’s suspicions concerning his wife were convinced he’d been arrested, and filed a protest with the government. But the Stasi insisted he hadn’t been arrested, and that insistence took on some credibility when the Stasi began conducting a thorough search of the city. After some months passed, a new story began circulating. According to this story the professor himself had believed he was about to be arrested and left his wife and child that fateful morning to head straight for the house with the tunnel, where he conveyed his alarm to his co-conspirators. Convinced that the police were about to descend any moment, the professor’s accomplices buried him with food and water in what had been completed of the tunnel. No one knew that only seven months later the rest of them would be sauntering across the border from east to west, through the Wall, with tens of thousands of other Germans.
To this day, according to Erickson’s dinner companions, the professor still didn’t know. To this day, the story went, he was still down in the tunnel. Not understanding the first thing about digging a tunnel, with no map and apparently not much sense of direction, the professor continued digging until finally, after weeks or months, he made a breakthrough, hacking his way with a pick into what he hoped was the targeted destination, the cellar of a house off Potsdamerstrasse west of the Wall. What he found instead was that he had returned to an earlier point of the tunnel. Slowly and gradually he had circled back on himself. His despair and panic must have been unutterable. For ten years the Tunneler honeycombed the no-man’s-land of the ghost Wall; amid the new, unfinished Potsdam Plaza one could hear his echoes from underground in the plaza’s empty corridors.
The strange thing was that afterward Erickson began hearing this absurd story everywhere, from anyone still left in the city. Whenever he bumped into someone long enough to have more than a three-minute conversation, the tale of the Tunneler came up. He heard it not only in the drunken Teutonic slur of the bars but from other tourists and little old ladies in bookshops and stray bankers from Frankfurt on the U-Bahn, one of whom, standing on the train, pointed at a hole in the underground wall of Kochstrasse station and said to Erickson, out of the blue, “Tunneler.” Excuse me? the American answered, not even sure the German was speaking to him, and the Frankfurt banker told him the story of how the Tunneler had dug his way into the U-Bahn and then, terrified he was still in the East, retreated, scurrying back into the blackness. And as Erickson looked at the hole in the wall of the darkened subway he remembered the last time he had come to Berlin, two years after the fall of the Wall, and how he took the U-Bahn from west to east and could still feel the passage from what had once been one side to what had once been the other; the ghosts of division still lurked in the underground. In the case of the Tunneler, however, he’d simply been underground too long, because the fact was that even if there had still been a Wall, Kochstrasse would have placed him not back in the East but in the West, about half a block beyond what was once Checkpoint Charlie.
It was in the rundown Ax Bax Bar near his hotel that the American writer first saw Georgie. He was a twenty-year-old skinhead and reputedly one of the leaders of the Pale Flame, but he didn’t appear to be leader of anything; with a face that was almost pretty, his mouth delicate like a girl’s. Georgie had a serene sweetness that knocked the edge off any hints of violence, sitting at the table laughing at jokes that didn’t include him, told by strangers standing around talking to other strangers. Every time Georgie laughed at one of the jokes, someone looked at him in dismay and moved to another part of the bar. This didn’t seem to perturb Georgie either. Erickson saw him again a few days later at another bar in Kreuzberg, and then about a week after that at the Brandenburg Gate.
The American was walking along the desolate stretch where the old Wall used to be, between the gate and the deserted Potsdam Plaza project, looking at the beginning of the Neuwall. In the distance he could hear the escaped monkeys from the zoo that now lived in the trees of the Tiergarten; as he drew nearer to the gate an alligator shot out of the garden, trailing the water of one of the ponds and slithering across the ugly barren scar of the old border to disappear toward Alexanderplatz. The Neuwall was built in the dead of night; the Pale Flame usually came along afterward to kick down the results. Sometimes the two forces battled in the gate’s shadow among the patches of moonlight. Begun in 1995 by a coalition of Stasi victims and Stasi informers, the Neuwall’s mortar was made from the rubble of the old Wall as well as the reduced paste and pulp of old Stasi files, which numbered in the millions, and whatever pieces of the Potsdam project—a pillar, a post, a demolished corridor—could be spirited away for the effort. The members of the Neuwall Brigade long ago agreed, not formally but implicitly, never to identify among themselves who had been informers and who had been informed upon, an unspoken treaty that was a by-product of why they seized the files in the first place, when the revelations of 1992 were exposing fellow workers and friends and husbands and wives and children to each other. They began the Neuwall not to eliminate freedom but to resurrect the promise that freedom held only when it was denied; they continued the Neuwall as a tribute to the way the old Wall was the spine of the world’s conscience, without which humanity was left to its own worst impulses in considering the final resolution between authority and freedom, order and anarchy.
More than this, however, the Brigade believed—for reasons similar to those that brought Erickson to Berlin—that the city’s function as the urban metaphor of the Twentieth Century couldn’t be fulfilled without a Wall. When the Wall fell and there stood behind it the naked figure of freedom, those in the East couldn’t stand the voluptuousness of her body while those in the West couldn’t stand the humanity of her face: there was the awful revelation that while at the outset of the millennium’s last decade people had pursued and embraced the ideal of freedom, at decade’s close they had come to despise its moral burden and absolve themselves of it. The Neuwall was bone white. It bore no graffiti. Earlier, upon its desecration by the Pale Flame and other gangs, someone among the vandals was just shrewd enough to realize they were only completing the concept, that their graffiti had already been anticipated and was part of the blueprint; thus the Pale Flame simply tore the Neuwall down when they could find it, otherwise leaving it unmarked. The Neuwall’s only message was written there by the Brigade itself: HITLER WAS ELECTED. Now the Pale Flame patrolled the city in vain looking for blurts of the Neuwall, wh
ich didn’t follow the path of the old but rather an inebriated, slapstick zigzag through the city. The old denominations of East and West no longer mattered; now what mattered was the mortified memory of a wall. It rocketed wildly up this street and down that one. For all that the Berliners of the year 1999 knew, any one of them might go to sleep at night only to find himself barricaded in the next morning, a wave of old Wall rubble and Stasi files petrified in his doorway, through which the only recourse was to tunnel.
Among the vendors still left at the Brandenburg Gate after the Wall’s fall, the American stopped to check out the Wall’s sad remains, undistinguished except for the vendors’ historical claims and, if one looked closely, some telltale bit of graffiti. Erickson always thought about buying a piece, just because someday soon it was all going to be gone. He had this idea that on Day X he’d sit in the hotel window clutching his bit of the Berlin Wall like a human time capsule, taking it with him to the other side. On this particular day that he saw Georgie at the gate. Erickson finally picked out a piece, at first glance the most nondescript chunk on the table because the flat outside part of the stone was blank, not a scribble of graffiti on it to note anything of the Wall at all; rather its markings were on the other side. Which didn’t make any sense, since the other side was part of the Wall’s craggy gray innards, where it wasn’t possible for anyone to have written anything. Yet there it was, the fragment of rhetoric: pursuit of happiness, and Erickson bought the stone and put it in his coat pocket and turned around and was staring right into Georgie Valis’ face.
He was smiling. The writer didn’t know whether Georgie remembered seeing him in Kreuzberg or the Ax Bax; maybe he was just hanging around the Brandenburg looking for a tourist to mug. Erickson would have thought it was pretty obvious he wasn’t worth mugging. At any rate Georgie was smiling and he started to talk and spoke perfect English, with barely a trace of an accent, or rather he spoke perfect American, which wasn’t necessarily surprising since the most interesting thing about Georgie wasn’t his repellent political affiliations but what two total strangers had told Erickson on the previous occasions he’d seen Georgie, that on the morning in 1989 when the East German professor left his house ostensibly for work but in fact to begin his life as the Tunneler of legend, Georgie was the ten-year-old son he held so close to him that final time.
In his short acquaintance with Georgie, Erickson never asked whether this was true. It seemed at times too personal and at other times too ridiculous, and there was no telling whether Georgie would have given a straight answer or not. What Erickson did note was Georgie’s profoundly ambivalent and furiously mystic obsession with the idea of America. More often than not this was a secret America that Erickson liked to think had little to do with the real one: Georgie was full of stories about great American geniuses Erickson had never heard of, cracked Midwest Nazi messiahs and white supremacists who Georgie assumed commanded the same rapt attention of everyone in the United States. Georgie’s obsession with America often got the better of his politics. Ultimately he didn’t discriminate between Thomas Paine and Crazy Horse, between sex goddesses and television stars and soul singers; Erickson was never sure Georgie recognized the contradictions. It didn’t seem possible Georgie could have listened to that blues tape of his and somehow heard a white man singing. Yet Georgie’s corrosive racial romanticism burned the black right off the singer until all that was left was the scarlet muscle of a beating heart.
They didn’t talk about politics. The American listened as Georgie rattled on, blithely and earnestly; Erickson would reproach himself afterward for not having said something. He’d reproach himself for not realizing that good manners, even in someone else’s country, had their limits. Only once during a Georgie monologue about niggers and fags and kikes and gooks—and it was a monologue rather than a rant; a rant might have provoked more of a response—did the writer suddenly blurt, “Maybe that’s just a lot of horseshit.” Erickson wished it had been pure moral indignation on his part but it was more reflexive than that, born of some growing dread in the back of his brain that he was going to have to spend the rest of the millennium ashamed of the fact that he hadn’t said anything while Georgie conducted his own personal holocaust. So Erickson said it.
Georgie stopped. He’d been staring straight ahead of him and now he stopped, and he didn’t turn to the other man or meet his eyes. He stopped as though the distant abrupt backfire of a car had disrupted his train of thought, and then Georgie just got back on the train, he just started back up where he’d been interrupted, and after a while he got onto the subject of America again, the betrayal of its promise, a theme they could both agree on, except Georgie’s version of the promise was rather different from the American’s version of the promise. Georgie’s version of the betrayal was different from Erickson’s version of the betrayal, which finally brought them around to Georgie’s real interest in the writer, the real reason he’d approached Erickson at the Brandenburg: the small chunk of Wall the writer had bought, with the remnant of its phrase on the back. Georgie had recognized it immediately.
He took the American to his flat in Kreuzberg. In the flat a dull light shone up from the floor. Out of a secret place in the floor against one wall Georgie hauled up a tape player and some tapes, skipping wildly from one musical selection to another, L.A. punk bands and Hollywood movie soundtracks and 1950s Julie London albums. High on the wall beyond anyone’s easy reach was what Georgie called his American Tarot. The cards were tacked to the wall in six rows of thirteen. From the floor peering up into the shadows of the wall it was impossible for the writer to see the cards clearly, but they appeared very old, and the thing one noticed immediately was the missing card: a place had been left for it in the seventh spot of the third row, right in the middle. Georgie’s flat was empty because in the badlands of Berlin one kept little except what one wasn’t afraid to lose, like his tapes, or what he couldn’t bring himself to disown, like his American Tarot, or what couldn’t be hauled away by scavengers. And in Georgie’s flat was also something that definitely couldn’t be hauled away by scavengers. It was a slab of the Wall, the old Wall, and it stood in the center of the huge flat towering over the emptiness, where it looked a lot bigger than it had out in the middle of the city ten years before. Erickson hadn’t a clue how Georgie got the Wall up there. At its base sat a can of black spray paint, and across the Wall’s surface, where the old graffiti had been sandblasted away, Georgie wrote his own, including phrases from the music that was blacker than his love for it would acknowledge.
Georgie and Erickson stood looking at his Wall and the writer thought about Georgie’s apocryphal American mother, who had rejected her country so she might drive Georgie’s apocryphal German father into the mother earth of the fatherland. That night, leaving the flat and heading for a bar, the two of them turned up a small sidestreet only to see, as though melting into the pavement, an afterthought of the Neuwall jutting insanely onto the landscape from a neighboring alley. Before the American’s eyes, Georgie transformed from innocence to ferocity. Struck motionless in his tracks, the young Berliner shook himself free of his stunned inertia to approach the Neuwall’s small pitiful sputter, still fresh from someone’s efforts only minutes before, where he kicked it, at first almost playfully. After a moment he wasn’t playful. Soon he was wailing futilely at the Neuwall as though trying to kick the whole thing down himself, his face black with rage, while the writer watching him realized in a flash that at this moment Georgie’s mother was up there with the Brigade in the Reichstag, in whatever wing the Pale Flame wasn’t occupying, one of the former informers decimating Stasi files into paste.
The last time he was in the United States, driving aimlessly through Wyoming and the Dakotas for the purpose of being aimless, he heard the news of the Cataclysm the same way he heard all the news that year, on the car radio. He turned the car around at the edge of Iowa and headed back toward the Pacific, assuming the Pacific was still there but never getting far enough
to be sure. Every few miles he stopped at a pay phone to try to call anyone in California he could get through to, until it was obvious this was a waste of time, and then somewhere in Utah Erickson came over the ridge of a mountain and saw ten miles ahead on the highway below him the cars backing up in the billowing sheen of the sunset. He met the traffic jam in the middle and they all sat there the rest of the night, no one going anywhere, the cars in front not going and the cars in back waiting for the cars in front to go, until the highway patrol finally came along announcing there was nothing for anyone to do but turn around. At dawn, when he got back up to that mountain ridge, Erickson pulled over and stared westward as though he might see columns of smoke rising in the direction of home, vast and steaming. But there was nothing to see.
Not long before, he’d lived in Los Angeles. For Erickson it had gotten to the point where there was no telling whether L.A. chose him or he chose it; he’d never loved it and had come to distrust people who said they did as much as he distrusted those who claimed they hated it, dismissing the perceptions of both lovers and haters as facile and shallow. He’d been born in Los Angeles, left it at one point in the mid-Seventies to spend some time in Paris and New York, and then returned precisely for L.A.’s profound lack of presence, the way it assimilated the Twentieth Century’s dislocation of memory from time into its own identity. He flattered himself as being liberated by the city’s abyss.
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