I pulled my pie out of the oven, satisfied with the golden-brown crust radiating warmth, the rising steam hinting at the gravy within. Wrapping it in a bath towel to keep it warm and to protect my hands, I negotiated the stairwell, heading for the Kulturbund rooms next door where the residents of my tenement held Sunday lunches. I was running a bit late, and most people had already started eating. I placed my pie on the side table, next to big bowls of red cabbage and bright vegetables, yeasty dumplings, letscho, a dish of kasha with root vegetables, a big pan of heaven-and-earth, a couple of kinds of sauces, several bowls of spring salads and a massive pot of Rote Grütze pudding.
I filled a plate and looked around for a place to sit. At the other end of the table Margrit, who lived a floor above me, gestured to the empty space next to her. I went over, rubbing her shoulder in greeting and sat down. On my other side was Frau Lehne, who was a bit deaf, and in any case preferred to enjoy her food rather than exchange small talk while at table, so I tucked in. The kasha was really good, and my pie lived up to expectations, garnering compliments from the other residents.
Once I’d finished my plate, I sat back, waiting a bit before going up for seconds. Margrit and I started talking, as usual, about our week, and when I mentioned that I’d been at the fascist demonstration she looked off into the distance, absenting herself from the chatter and clinking of cutlery on plates that surrounded us. After a moment she began telling me a story.
“A few years ago, at our factory, we had a Vietnamese woman in our work brigade. I say in our brigade, but she wasn’t really. She couldn’t speak German, and she never came along to any of the social events. But every day at work, there she was, stretching up to reach the workbench—she was too small for the standard issue stool that we all used. And one day she wasn’t there any more. I didn’t really notice for, oh, I don’t know how long, a few days probably. Then I went to the brigade leader and asked where our colleague was, whether she was ill, whether anyone had gone to see her and check whether she needed anything. The brigade leader just shrugged and said I should talk to the union. So I went to the BGL office and tried to talk to them but they just shrugged and told me the Fidschis were none of my concern. This was in summer 1989, when we were all starting to get a bit uppity, so I didn’t let the matter rest. I went to another brigade, one that was only Vietnamese contract workers. Problem was, there was only one of them who could speak any German at all. She said the same thing: No, no. You leave, nothing for you, was all she would say to me.
“So after work I went round to the hostel, the place where our factory put the contract workers. It was like student halls, only worse, they were really crammed in, triple bunk beds, a couple of a dozen people to each room. I had to blag my way past the security guard, and once I’d made it in, it took me a while before I could find anyone to talk to. So after asking a whole load of people I found this woman who could speak a bit of German. She told me that my colleague had been sent home, back to Vietnam. She was pregnant. That was it: she was pregnant. She was no longer suitable for work in our socialist homeland. All that propaganda about internationalism, about supporting the socialist brother-countries, but there I was in this hostel, men and women not allowed to mix, roll-call at six every morning, no integration with colleagues, no German lessons. Treated like prisoners, cheap labour, that’s all they were. That is what the Party’s proletarian solidarity looked like!”
I remembered the contract workers from Vietnam, Algeria, Hungary. Some had returned home in 1990, but many had stayed, seeing more opportunity and hope in our revolution than at home.
“I’ll never forget her, but you know what I’m really ashamed of? I don’t even know that woman’s name. I didn’t talk to her when she worked with us. In my brigade we all used to have a laugh, we’d all go to the canteen, go bowling together. But she was never there, she’d join her friends in the Vietnamese brigades. I never even asked her name.” Margrit was staring at her plate as she talked, using her fork to poke at a few leftover crumbs of pie crust.
“And now when I see what’s happening, just a few streets away, I wonder whether it should really be such a surprise to us—if our socialist state was so racist, so lacking in respect for people, whether its own people or those who’ve come to help us with their labour—is it any surprise we’ve got this problem now, these racist, fascist bigots, running riot: pissing on people, pissing on our dreams?”
“But what can we do? What do you think we can do?” I asked her.
“Lock the bastards up, throw away the bloody key. It’s what they deserve!” I was taken aback by her viciousness, but she hadn’t finished. She gave me a half smile. “And yet we both know that’s not really the answer, don’t we? Why didn’t they lock them up back then? I don’t know. What do we do with these fascists? They’re not the kind of people we can just talk to, are they?”
She paused again, obviously thinking, still poking the crumbs, pushing them along with her fork. Shove, shove, from one side to the other, then back again.
“We need a new way to deal with them. It’s not like we can hold a referendum on whether to simply abolish racism and fascism. It’s not enough to discuss it at the Round Table, talk about why we don’t want them.” She paused, still thinking about the problem, staring at her plate.
People had started to get pudding, so I got up and spooned Rote Grütze into a couple of bowls, taking them back to the table. I took the fork out of Margrit’s hand and pushed her plate away, replacing it with a bowl. She was so deep in thought she hardly noticed the exchange.
“But you know what frightens me most about them?” She carried on as if I hadn’t been away. “It’s not the violence, although that’s pretty awful. It’s the absolute commitment, the unquestioning belief that they are right. We’ve seen it before, we’ve all seen that before, haven’t we? But what scares me is that I too once believed. Years ago, when I first started work, I applied to be a Communist Party member candidate. I had the faith, but they didn’t want me in the end. An absence of political maturity they said, and I’m glad about that now.” She looked around for her spoon and picked it up, resting the blade of her hand on the table. “But you know what that means? It means that I could have been like them, unquestioning, unthinking, conforming.”
A pause, while we both pondered Margrit’s words, then she continued.
“And you know what? I wonder about it now, too. We have a belief system now. Sure, it’s widespread, it’s humanist, we’re not going to beat people up if they don’t agree with us. But how are we going to stop people if they’re really set on tearing apart our dreams? People like these skinheads, or like those Stasi stooges you arrested last year. What do we do with them?”
I thought about the old Politbüro, the grey men who used to rule the country. They felt a humanist duty too, they thought that duty obliged them to issue orders to shoot people who tried to flee the country. They thought that humanist duty bound them to capture and torture those who thought differently.
The way we deal with those who think differently—the troublemakers, the ones who refuse to participate in our dreams—how we deal with them would be the making or breaking of us.
Karo
“Karo!” Schimmel was banging on my door, waking me up.
“The fuck? I was asleep, Schimmel!”
Schimmel didn’t even stop, he loped across my room and pulled me off the mattress.
“You’ve got to see this, come on!”
I shook Schimmel off and left him standing there, arms dangling, face bright red, dead excited.
“OK then, what do you want?” I got up and pulled on a pair of jeans, then followed him down the hall.
Schimmel’s room was full of junk. Metal and plastic boxes with wires and circuit boards and shit like that just lying around. It didn’t make any sense to me, and it didn’t look very homely either. He was squatting on the floor, in front of one of these boxes, a television balanced on top.
“Look at this!
” he shouted, pointing at some green writing on the black screen in front of him.
I could see a load of Xs were on the screen, and if I squinted hard enough I could make out the letters WOTAN BBS.
Schimmel typed something in and the screen changed to some kind of list. Using the arrow keys Schimmel made the screen change a few more times.
“This is a Bulletin Board System used by the Nazis. Rex asked me to have a look at-”
“Whoa, slow down a bit! What you going on about Schimmel?”
“Look, it’s really simple. This is a computer network, it’s like …” Schimmel took his eyes of the screen for a moment, looking round the room, trying to find a way to explain what he was doing. “Like a library, no, a filing cabinet. A message board. You dial in and you can leave stuff here, and see what others have left. Like files, or messages or whatever.” Schimmel was still pressing lots of keys and the screen kept changing. A little box on the floor had four or five green lights that kept blinking at me.
“Dial in? You mean on a phone? We don’t have a phone!”
Schimmel was concentrating, but he took a moment to grin at me. “I spliced into the line from that empty shop next door.”
He was still stabbing away at the keyboard and I was about to have a go at him for waking me up for no reason when he yelled again.
“Here it is! I lost the connection before. Here, read this!”
I looked over his shoulder at the screen.
“This is the fash?”
“Yeah, I told you, I got the details from Rex. This is where they talk about what they’re up to.”
“What, so anyone can read it? Not even the fash are that stupid!”
“No, you can’t find this unless you’ve got the phone number. And even then you need a password.” Schimmel could tell I didn’t know what he was on about so he tried again. “You get your computer to phone their computer, and they can share this.” He pointed at the screen, all the information there. “But you can only do that if you know the phone number and have the right name and password.”
“OK …”
“And they write stuff like this.” A few more clicks on the keyboard and a new load of type came up on the screen.
“So what’s that, a list of their members?”
On the screen was a list of people’s names and addresses. I didn’t recognise any of them.
“No, I think it’s a kind of hit list.”
One of the names stuck out because almost all of the addresses were in East Berlin, but this one was a hospital in West Berlin. Schimmel pressed the down arrow and the lines slid up the screen to be replaced by yet more addresses.
“Shit!” Schimmel stopped pressing keys and pointed at the screen. “That’s Martin!”
Martin
After the potluck I decided to give Incognito another go. I’d just pressed the play button when Karo banged at the door.
“Are you missing me?” I stopped when I saw her face. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Karo look so serious. Schimmel stood in the hall behind her.
“Martin, you’ve got to look at this.” Karo came right in, and was unreeling a computer print-out on my kitchen table. She jammed her finger onto one of the names. “This is you!”
I turned off the tape player and looked at where Karo was pointing. There was my name, Martin Grobe, and the address of the RS2 offices.
“What is this?”
“It’s a list I found on a Bulletin Board used by the Nazis,” Schimmel said from behind Karo.
I looked at Karo, hoping she could translate.
“It’s like a meeting place for fascists, on a computer that they can all get access to.”
Schimmel looked like he was going to argue with Karo’s description, but she waved her hand at him. “It’s a hit list—and you’re on it!”
I picked up the end of the print-out and started looking through it. There was about twenty pages of names, all printed out in dot matrix, barely legible.
“Why do you think it’s a hit list? Even if it is, there are so many names here that it’ll take them years before I get to the top.” I sat down and crossed my legs. I can’t say I wasn’t disturbed by seeing my name on this list, but after the events of last autumn I was public property—I’d been in the papers and on the telly. This kind of thing was only to be expected.
I started at the top of the list again, reading more carefully this time. “Look, practically the whole government is on this list, along with Volkskammer representatives, Central and local Round Table members—this is the list of a fantasist.”
I managed to get Karo and Schimmel to calm down a bit, told them to make a coffee while I carried on looking through the list. “I’m going to pass the list on to the Kripo,” I told them, ignoring the face Karo pulled at the mention of the police. “And I’ll take it into work. I’ll go through our files, see if anyone on the list has come to grief recently. That way we’ll know how seriously to take it.”
Karo slumped onto a chair, her fear draining away. “But you’re going to take it seriously?” she demanded. She waited for me to nod before going on. “OK, in that case, and since we’re here anyway: I’m helping to set up a gig, up in Prenzlauer Berg. In the Schlaraffenhaus—it’s going to be really cool. You wanna come? Say you will, because then we can keep an eye on you.”
In the end I gave in to Karo’s pleading and agreed to check out the gig. That’s why a few hours later I got the tram up to Prenzlauer Berg. I got off at the end of Dimitroffstrasse, but outside the police station a group of people had converged, standing around a bloke strumming a guitar and crooning in a low voice. Somehow he managed to compete not only with the noise made by the band accompanying him, but also with the elevated railway and the trams going past. A small child strutted around in front of the singer, wearing denim dungarees, her hair was cut short at the front, rat tails dragging down the back of her neck. She held a pair of drumsticks and air drummed while the band played out. Meanwhile the next act waited in the wings: jeans hanging loose around his waist, shirt open over a T-shirt advertising some Western band.
A drunkard stumbled through the crowd, arms paddling—clawing himself along, hands grappling the air.
Oblivious to the impromptu concert, crowds of people swelled around the knot of music lovers, growing and diminishing to the rhythm of the traffic lights controlling the pedestrian crossing.
The person next to me half turned and elbowed me in a drunken, friendly way.
“Drink!” he shouted, waving a bottle of vodka at me and smiling. His forehead was shadowed under the peak of a traditional Heinrichsmütze cap, but his face lit up periodically in the headlights of cars turning onto Schönhauser Allee.
He produced two glasses, and poured out some vodka, right up to the brim. Parking the bottle in his pocket, he gave me my shot, looked me in the eye, toasted me then necked the liquid.
“Prosit!” I swallowed down my vodka too.
“Prosit!” he said again, about to turn away, ready to find another recipient for his liquid generosity.
“Where are you from?” I asked him before he went.
“I am of German Democratic Republic,” he slurred, but still rolling the Rs, “of G-D-R” He pronounced it the Russian way: Djay-Day-Err.
“You’re new here? Welcome!”
“This is my home, Djay-Day-Err. I am here. Now I am happy and I am safe. And Prosit!” He moved on, readying the glasses for a refill.
Karo
I was sorting out the loudspeakers in the cellar-bar when Martin got there. A couple of band members were meant to be helping but they were just getting in the way and being generally annoying. So I left them to it and gave Martin a hug.
“Still alive then?” I could smell drink on his breath. “You stink! You started drinking already? Anyway, you’re gonna love this, they’re an amazing act—you’re going to cream yourself!”
“O-kaaay.” Martin raised an eyebrow at me.
“No, seriously, man. You
. Are. Gonna. Love. The show!” I told the two hippies what to do with the wires and took Martin back up into the yard. “It’s jazz. The band that shoulda played tonight, they bailed out. Post folk-punk-metal it was. But these guys offered to plug the gap, and I listened to a demo tape. Fucking. Ace. I mean, even I like them!”
Martin shrugged as if to say he reserved the right to leave at any point.
I punched him on the shoulder.
One of the drummers was a dude with really wide shoulders, red shirt stretched tight over his chest. Forearms like tree trunks. The whole time he was playing he had his eyes fixed on the other drummer. She didn’t ever look at the drums, her hands and drumsticks just, like a blur—you literally couldn’t see them—just beating away: bum-bum-bummmm. The guy with the trombone though, he was totally focussed on the microphone stand in front of him. He was pushing his hand and the mike right into the bell of his instrument. The double bass player was even more manic, it was really crazy—he was foaming at the mouth, and mumbling something that you couldn’t hear over the noise, his eyes roving over all of us in the audience as if he was looking for the bastard who’d nicked the score sheet.
The saxophonist was the last of the group, and he was really chilled. He had this massive ragged beard that matched his wild hair, and he was doing this weird thing with his sax, wailing and screaming at random moments.
The sound they were making had less tune than your typical neo-grindcore punk—it was just a bass throb intertwined with higher notes. Completely undanceable, impossibly fast, no melody to follow. Totally ace. The dance-floor was chokka, everyone had their hands up in the air.
A disembodied voice sang the Internationale: Völker hört die Signale! Auf zum letzten Gefecht! It was like some ghost wailing, and I was trying to work out how they did that. There was no tape player, I know because I set up the sound system. Where was that voice coming from? And then I worked it out. The guy with the trombone, he wasn’t blowing into the mouthpiece, he was shouting into it! He suddenly switched the lyrics: The ghost-towns, forgotten/ Kronstadt, Budapest and Prague/ where the spectre of Communism still haunts/ still knocking in the pipes. It was so ace, the ghostly hand of the past being totally twatted to fuck by this stupidly fast beat.
Thoughts Are Free Page 8
