We soon knew the entire first verse by heart. Suddenly one of the German boys leapt onto the table and started jigging in time to the music, prompting more laughter and clapping all around. Finally, after a last stomp, the boy jumped down from the table and managed to squeeze into the chair next to Margo. He sat grinning at her as he caught his breath and before I knew it another boy with a long yellow scarf had seated himself on the other side next to me. The two boys introduced themselves as Werner and Heinz. They told us they’d been sent to Paris on an apprenticeship program to study the French metro system as part of a massive rebuilding of the subways in West Berlin destroyed during the war. Werner, an engineer student, lived in West Berlin, and his buddy, Heinz, had moved from East Berlin to Paris to room with him and find work since there were no jobs in his sector. Now Heinz was also in the apprenticeship program.
“We don’t have girlfriends,” they claimed, laughing. Talking loudly over the din they asked about our trip. “You not go to Berlin?” Heinz asked. “Too bad. You must see it. Only nine years after the war and it is being rebuilt. There are many changes.”
When we left the bar at 3:00 a.m. beer was still flowing. Heinz and Werner walked us back to the Hotel Select where lingering Bastille Day festivities still enlivened the streets. Clusters of partiers were traipsing through the square, and a few lone instruments streamed low jazz notes over the sparsely filled chairs on the sidewalk. We sipped wine at a café next to the hotel. By the time Heinz and Werner got up to leave at 4:00 a.m. they had briefed us on the plight of Germany and obtained our address.
The next evening I sat nursing a Coke with Margo and Mary, a young teacher from the tour, at an outdoor café near the hotel. The street had fallen into a humming quiet as if spent after the recent all-night festivities. Tonight we would turn in early. As I fingered the glass in my hand, a young Frenchman moved up to our table. He was a tall boy dressed in a brown corduroy jacket with a pixie smile on his face, hands burrowed deep in his pockets. Would we like to join him and his two friends for a beer? We looked over at the next table. Two young boys in crew-necked shirts and slacks were smiling at us.
Instead we invited them to our table. The tall one sat down next to me and with a wide smile introduced himself as Jean Paul. He was full of inquiries: our home towns, our travel plans, our ambitions. His halting English was filled in by his two companions, Jacques and André, who spoke with heavy French accents.
Margo and Mary soon left for the hotel and welcome sleep, but I stayed on despite the fact I could hardly keep my eyes open. I wanted to listen to Jean Paul. I was transfixed by the sound of his words, a combination of broken English and French, by the rhythm and inflections of the French language. Clearly the garrulous one of the trio, Jean Paul shared his battery of ideas on French people, American culture, and the French political scene. His brown eyes glittered with intelligence, his manner was respectful, and a playful hint of impudence accompanied his smile.
“Quelle heure est-il? (What time is it?)” I stammered in my meager French, anxious to communicate with him directly. Besides, I needed to practice.
Jean Paul looked amused. After a few exchanges he learned over and said, “You must learn French.”
I assured him—making up my mind on the spot—that learning French was one of my top priorities. “And you learn English. You live here on the continent. You have no excuse,” I teased. Jean Paul gave me a lopsided smile and we agreed to meet the next day after the tour returned from the Louvre.
The next afternoon I was in the lobby of the Hotel Select on the dot. Jean Paul and I walked along the narrow sidewalks of Boulevard Saint Germain-des-Près to the Deux Magots and scooted around a small round table. Next to us people were talking softly and reading newspapers. Soon his friend Jacques joined us, ordered a café-au-lait and offered us a Galois cigarette. Jean Paul told me he worked at a carpet shop and lived with his parents in the 16th arrondissement. The talk led to Jean Paul Sartre’s latest book, De Gaulle’s triumphal resistance during the war, and the fierce French sense of individualism. I was amazed that a non-college boy knew as much as he did. Decidedly, the French were the most interesting people on earth, and, I was beginning to believe, the most beguiling.
Jean Paul insisted on walking me back to the hotel. At the door he turned to face me, said he was sorry I was leaving the next moring, and asked for my address. Please would I write to him? I expressed a desire to return to Paris.
”You are—plein de curiosité,” he said in his hesitant French. “You learn.”
Jean Paul said he would wait for my letter. I would write in English, he in French. Paris had captured my imagination and I knew I would return. And if Jean Paul were there, so much the better.
* * *
When the Golden Bears arrived in Hamburg, Margo and I found an invitation waiting for us. It was a letter from Heinz. Please come and see the real Germany. He and Werner would meet us and show us around. Wow! A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was ready to go in a second. Margo, after discussing the pros and cons with Ian, our English tour director, finally agreed, and before we knew it we had landed at the airport in Allied-occupied Berlin and caught a taxi to a nearby hotel, where we were booked for the next three days.
Later that afternoon a bus dropped us off in a rather dingy neighborhood where the apartment buildings looked alike: tall slabs standing side by side, one after another. One of them displayed the number we were looking for. Once inside we scanned the list of apartment numbers. Werner’s number wasn’t on it. That was strange. We felt suddenly dependent, lost in a foreign country, surrounded by a language we couldn’t speak. The only tactic was to keep knocking on doors, floor after floor, until we came to his apartment. We had to hope and pray that it was the right building and that he was home. We were dubious—a needle in a haystack. But what choice did we have?
We decided to start at the top, the fourteenth floor, and make inquiries. Would they even talk to us, foreigners who had floated in from nowhere and knew no German? The first door we knocked on at the end of a dark corridor was silent for several long minutes—no rustling, no footsteps, no gleam of light under the door. Finally, the door cracked open a bit, stopped, then it opened wider and—amazingly— there stood Werner. He was delighted to see us and set about serving coffee while we waited for Heinz to return from his work at the U-Bahn.
When Heinz showed up he was equally pleased. He could not believe we were there. Over dinner at a nearby restaurant, our two new friends plotted sites and marked bus schedules for us to follow the next day while they were at work. I stashed the directions in my purse, along with a miniature German-English dictionary, a guide book, and a coin-purse full of Deutschmarks.
The next day Margo and I set out to see West Berlin. We found ourselves in a singular landscape. This grim scene of black-and-white destruction contrasted with the carefree colors of the other European cities we’d seen. Rows of crumbled buildings stretched block after block, pitched archways were attached to nothing, and remnants of walls stood here and there on blocks of dry flat land. All that remained of a former shopping center was one wing of a building protruding into the middle of an empty lot.
The people in the streets looked solemn, dutiful, going about their business. We saw an old woman with an armful of mauve flowers and a bundle slung over her shoulder walk into the remains of an apartment building. It was still inhabited, even though only one corner remained standing. The skeleton structure stood like an abandoned obelisk in the center of the flattened block, piles of concrete crumbled on the ground beside it. Shirts and sheets hung on lines between the windows of the apartment walls that remained. Occasionally we saw workmen digging into the rubble, attempting to resurrect the city that had been brought to its knees by relentless bombing. We walked on, conscious of being carefree foreigners in a laboring city.
Later that afternoon the bus let us off near the Brandenburg
Gate, our destination. The gate loomed, still intact, proud and dominating despite its blackened façade and the splintered columns. Not far from the gate we passed an obscure concrete structure fronted with circular steps and decided to investigate. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The round-walled interior contained murals of battle scenes and plaques engraved in a foreign alphabet. The building appeared to be deserted. Curious, we approached a narrow flight of stairs at the end of a hallway and started up, looking for someone or some sign. It was dead quiet.
Suddenly we heard muffled noises coming from the top of the stairs. Carefully, we inched up to an iron trap door above our heads. I gave it one push and the door flew open. The voices immediately ceased, and a dead, suspenseful quiet filled the air. Margo and I gingerly stuck our heads out the opening and observed a scattering of guards in uniform sitting on pipes and standing by the roof railing. They swirled around at once, uttering shouts in a foreign language as we climbed onto the deck and stood looking at them, astounded. Several grabbed guns that had been lying next to them and pointed them directly at us, locked into assault position. I heard Margo gasp and I couldn’t move, too shocked to think or even register the knot of fear that grabbed my stomach. What in the world? It seemed we had surprised the men on a break—several held beer cans and were smoking cigarettes in the open air. We took them to be not more than twenty years old. They stared at us, as shocked as we were to have their off-limits territory invaded.
There was a ponderous silence as we all took in the situation. They looked youthful in their casual disarray; not at all like the helmeted guards we had seen standing at attention elsewhere at the perimeters of the war zone.
“Touristes!” we repeated several times.
They stared.
“Spreken English?”
Not a sound from them.
“Americanes,” I blurted and pointed to Margo and me and held up my guide book with the word FODOR in big green letters.
Finally, one smiled and called out, “Russkiy,” pointing to the hammer and sickle on the sleeve of his jacket. Russian! He then rattled off something in Russian, to which there was answering laughter. Margo and I looked at each other. I pulled my jacket pockets inside out and splayed my hands palms up, trying to indicate we were harmless.
“Verboten!” one said sternly, not budging. But the others sat back down, took up their beer cans and evidently discussing the situation, exchanged a few indistinguishable words.
In a minute they were talking rapidly and smiling. Finally, one of them lifted a beer can in our direction and I reciprocated with a miming arm raise in return. This was greeted with laughter and the atmosphere relaxed considerably. Just as I thought we were going to be invited to their party, footsteps sounded on the stairs and two older guards appeared. On seeing us they began barking loudly. Margo and I grasped their meaning at once: we were to get out. As the two guards directed us down the stairs, I glanced over at the boys who had resumed their serious expressions and did not look in our direction.
Heinz and Werner were reproachful when they heard about our experience at the Russian War Memorial, shaking their heads at our pleas of innocence. I realized we had acted like naive, careless Americans, but I was too hungry for adventure and novelty to care. No harm done! Nor did they sympathize when we told them about wandering inadvertently into East Berlin territory, where we were turned back by the strident cries of “Verboten!” thrown at us by the border guards.
“You must be more careful!” the boys told us.
After dinner, they led us to a local pub where we squeezed into a wooden table in the back. The sparsely lit room was crowded with people, mostly students, who piled in with much exchanging of chairs and squeezing between tables. Conversations were intense and I thrilled to the sound of crisp German words on all sides, the sight of tall ceramic mugs swinging past on trays, and the presence of two comely boys seated friendly and serious across from us. I was in a state nearing euphoria. Margo must have felt something of the same for she was quizzing our new friends excitedly. They had heard a great deal of our history and now they were eager to tell their story.
“Werner and I have known each other since childhood,” Heinz explained. “Werner’s uncle owns an engraving business and set Werner up with an apprenticeship in his shop.”
“I was too young to join the German army,” Werner put in.
“Were you a member of the fascist party during the war?” Margo asked.
“I was a member of the German Youth Camp. It was required of all fifteen-year-olds,” replied Heinz. “I obediently recited the Nazi chants and marched to the party tunes, but I wasn’t political or especially nationalistic.”
In the nine years since Germany’s surrender and its division into Allied and Russian zones, Heinz told us, the Germans were slowly recovering but the split was causing dissension between the two sides, democratic and communist, with their different economic structures. After the war, faced with high unemployment in the East, Heinz had moved to the Western Zone where he found work and moved in with Werner.
“I am now cut off from my family in East Berlin. It is a great hardship.” Heinz passionately wanted Margo and me to understand the uncertainty of Germany’s economic future and its vital need for reunification.
As we parted that evening, Heinz offered to take us to East Berlin before we returned to Hamburg. I jumped at the chance. To be able to explore a closeted city with the intelligent Heinz appealed to me. Margo objected. It wasn’t legal. Americans weren’t allowed into the Russian zone. It was madness.
I wasn’t going to let such an opportunity pass. The next afternoon while Margo relaxed at the hotel with her Fodor, Heinz and I set out for East Berlin. We had dressed in dark clothes and I wore a scarf tied around my head, trying to look inconspicuous. It was 5:00 p.m. but the subway was only half-full. People sat silently, their bland faces looking straight ahead as the car chugged towards the Eastern sector. I pulled close to Heinz. Three men seated across wore drab, indistinct clothes. Something about them was strikingly impersonal. Before the Berlin Wall was erected, people were able to pass cautiously between the two sectors. Usually, only those with approved business made the trip. Everyone was afraid of being questioned. We were careful not to speak or make an unusual gesture as Heinz handed the passing conductor our tickets.
When the train arrived in East Berlin it was getting dark. People on the streets of East Berlin, dressed in shades of black or brown, passed by wordlessly. There were no young people about. Most of the men carried a bag or briefcase and looked solemn. We found an exchange post and changed our western marks into eastern money, which was worth a lot less—for one western mark we received five eastern marks. Along Frankfurt Allee—now called Stalin Allee—tall rectangular apartment buildings lined each side of the street; identical blocks repeated as far as the eye could follow into the distance. Here, Heinz explained, deserving communist party members lived. It was one of their privileges.
There were no buses running or passing taxis as we walked far out into what used to be the outskirts of the city, which was now bombed into a dry desert full of crumbled buildings and debris. Block after block showed the same destruction as parts of the West sector, but here rebuilding was more urgent. Many of the ruins had been cleaned up. Old buildings and foundations had, for the most part, been cleared away and chain fences surrounded neat plots of empty ground. The sidewalks lay flat and empty like a ghost town. There was not a single tree.
I mailed a card with a photo of Stalin Allee on it to Minnesota. On it I wrote:
Dear Mom and Pop, Am having a wonderful time, wish you were here. We leave East Berlin in several hours and then back to Hamburg. Love.
Bombed buildings in East Berlin, 1954.
I slipped the card into the post box with satisfaction. I felt a need to brag, as if we had broken a record or pulled off a coup. The impulse to sh
ock was irresistible—I wanted to knock my parents over with my unique run of luck.
We walked the streets for hours. As night deepened, the sidewalks emptied and the ruins of buildings disappeared into darkness. Glad to sit down, we stopped at a small café for supper. By the time we were back on the street it was late. Several drunken men staggered around corners, illuminated by street lamps that shone a harsh glare into the dusty air. A Russian factory blazed in the darkness, lights popping and machines humming.
It was nearing midnight when we boarded the subway to return to West Berlin. I pulled the scarf around my cheeks and refrained from speaking. We remained wary, although we expected no interference if we minded our own business. It was far tougher to get out of the eastern sector than to get in. In 1954, people were technically allowed to cross in and out of the two sectors freely, but cars were checked for prohibited goods, particularly those headed to the west. Phone calls were not allowed in either direction. I sat silently next to Heinz, feeling the train drawing us back to the West Zone, to the Golden Bears, back to openness where one could breathe freely, back to frivolity.
Once the train was under way, Heinz began speaking with a quiet intensity. “You must know,” he said in a low voice, looking at me steadily, “two Germanys are impossible. With separate Germanys brothers are separated, families are split, and the economies go in different directions. Each side solidifies its system as the years pass and the rift becomes irreparable. We are one people. Reunification is imperative.”
Heinz wanted me to understand. He wanted America to understand. America, with its freedom, high standard of living, influence around the world, and its vast resources. Americans lived on another continent. How could we possibly understand?
But he thought I might. I squeezed his hand and believed every word he said.
A Penny a Kiss Page 20
