Sektion 20

by Paul Dowswell

  Nadel was singing the praises of the Trabi, and saying how it was a better car than the West German equivalent, the Volkswagen Beetle. Alex wasn’t so sure.

  ‘The Beetle is tainted by its Nazi past,’ said Nadel loftily. It had originally been designed for the Nazi ‘Strength Through Joy’ organisation, as Hitler’s ‘people’s car’.

  ‘Yes, it was cheap and mass produced,’ said Alex, who knew all this, ‘just like the Trabi. The Volkswagen goes faster,’ Alex continued. ‘A whole 30 kph faster.’

  ‘And how do you know that?’ said Nadel.

  ‘Come on,’ laughed Alex. ‘Don’t tell me you never watch the West German TV? It’s there in the adverts – a top speed of 130 kph.’

  ‘I don’t pollute my brain with dross from the West,’ said Nadel.

  ‘Too bad. You might learn something useful,’ said Alex. Sophie kicked him under the table. But Alex would not let it go.

  ‘And you can get Beetles in all sorts of colours – red, gold, black, white, whatever,’ he said. ‘What colours d’you get with a Trabi?’ Alex held up his hand to count. ‘Blue . . .’ He held up one finger. ‘Green . . .’ Two fingers. ‘Er . . . ? No. That’s it.’

  ‘Different colours are a waste of workers’ time and a sign of bourgeois decadence,’ said Nadel. He was getting flustered. Everyone had stopped to listen.

  ‘Go on, admit it.’ Alex was sensing victory. ‘You see Beetles all over the world. If you ever watched the British or American films on Western TV, you’d see Beetles on the streets of London and Los Angeles. I have never seen a Trabi anywhere outside of the Eastern Countries.’

  Nadel had no answer to that. Alex moved in for the kill. ‘Maybe the fact that the Trabi has no fuel gauge puts people in the West off buying it?’ he said with a smirk.

  ‘You just need to keep an eye on your kilometres and remember how much fuel you have put in,’ said Nadel. ‘It’s no problem for anyone with a brain in their head.’

  ‘A fuel gauge seemed such an obvious piece of equipment on a car . . .’

  Nadel huffed impatiently. ‘The simpler the car, the less chance of a breakdown.’

  ‘I’ve seen our Trabi engine being repaired on the kitchen table enough times to know that’s not the case,’ said Alex.

  The others round the table all laughed at that.

  Nadel had had enough. ‘That is simply not true,’ he declared with frightening certainty. ‘The Trabi is more reliable and cheaper. What could be a better advert for socialism?’

  ‘Advert?’ said Alex. ‘Bit of a capitalist word, isn’t it?’

  ‘Alex . . .’ Nadel leaned back on his chair and replied with magisterial condescension, ‘your frivolity will be the end of you.’ Alex reached his foot under the table and pulled the back leg of Nadel’s chair towards him. Nadel crashed to the floor and his beer toppled after him, covering his head and shoulders. Dripping and humiliated, he scrambled to his feet and launched himself at Alex in a blind fury.

  Alex was no fighter. The last time he had come to blows with anyone was in kindergarten. He held up his arms to fend off the blows and waited for the other lads in the party to pull Nadel off him.

  A tirade of obscenities followed before Nadel hurried to the lavatory to wash the beer from his hair. The waiter came over to Emmy and whispered in her ear.

  ‘You horrible boy,’ she cried. ‘Ruining my party. And now we’ve been asked to leave.’

  Alex suddenly felt less triumphant. ‘I’m sorry, Emmy. I’ll talk to the waiter. I shall go.’

  Sophie was looking at him with open exasperation. Alex knew there were others there who lived close by them. She would not have to travel home alone.

  He spoke to the waiter, apologised for the trouble and left.

  Alex was so hot and bothered and angry with himself for spoiling the evening that he was halfway to the tram stop in Alexanderplatz when a chill gust of wind blew straight through him and he realised he had left his pullover behind. It wasn’t just the cold that made him go back for it. His mother had made it for him with the best wool she could afford. She would be very upset if he lost it.

  When he returned, most of the diners at Café Wolfgang had abandoned their tables for the dance floor. They were moving fairly listlessly to some home-grown pop song Alex half recognised from the radio. In the tradition of East German discos, the song was taken off after a few bars and the introduction to ‘Get It On’ by the British group T. Rex energised the dance floor like a jolt of electricity. Alex smiled at the stupid rule that demanded two-thirds of recorded music played in public places had to come from communist countries. Most venues got round it by playing brief snippets of their own music and Western songs in their entirety.

  He picked up his pullover and looked around for Sophie to tell her he was sorry, but he couldn’t see her. Now he had calmed down he was starting to feel embarrassed about his behaviour. He hurried down the stairs but as he came out into Greifswalder Strasse, Alex heard some movement behind him. He peered up the dimly lit stairs to see two figures having a heated exchange. ‘Get away from me.’ Alex recognised her voice at once.

  Looking again he could see Sophie trying to break away, but the man with her was holding on to her arm. Alex ran up the stairs. ‘Hey,’ he said to the man. ‘Let her go.’

  The fellow was older and stronger than Alex. Without saying a word he turned and shoved Alex off his feet. Sophie broke free and grabbed Alex’s arm just as he was about to fall down the stairs. They took off together, leaving the man to hurl insults at them both, but at least he didn’t follow them.

  ‘That was Charlie,’ she said. ‘I went out with him a couple of times when I first arrived here. I think he followed me here. I told him to leave me alone weeks ago. When he realised I wasn’t joking, he didn’t say much, but he had this stubborn determined look on his face. I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.

  ‘And Mutter and Vater thought he was just right for me,’ she said indignantly. ‘Youth group leader. Exemplary socialist youth. Complete creep would be more like it.’

  They had barely gone twenty metres when she hooked a hand round his elbow and they walked together arm in arm.

  ‘Am I forgiven?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I was an idiot with Nadel. He gets up my nose.’

  ‘You were doing so well,’ said Sophie and pulled him closer to her, ‘until the business with the chair.’ She suppressed a chuckle. ‘That wasn’t strictly necessary.’

  Her mood changed abruptly. ‘Charlie,’ she spat. ‘He came on to me here, then when I decided to go home, he insisted he would run me back on his moped. Then he grabbed me and tried to kiss me.’

  Alex decided it was the moment to be bold.

  ‘What, like this?’ he said, and turned and kissed her.

  She was soft and warm and still tasted of the raspberry liquor he’d bought her just before the evening all went wrong.

  ‘Exactly like that,’ she said.

  After they kissed again, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

  ‘I started to worry about you going home on your own,’ Alex said.

  ‘I’m glad you came back,’ she said.

  If they walked home rather than take the tram, they decided, they would have just enough money for another drink. So they went to Café Luxembourg on Karl-Marx-Allee and had another beer and raspberry liquor.

  It was a long walk back to Treptower, but Alex thought it was one of the best nights of his life.

  Chapter 9

  Sophie asked Alex to meet her in the park after school on Saturday afternoon. They huddled together against the cold and walked down to the funfair. She carried a bag on her shoulder and wouldn’t tell Alex what was in it. ‘Only after you buy me a coffee,’ she smiled.

  They enjoyed themselves at the fair, riding on the mechanical swans and the donkeys, even though they felt far too old for them. It was fun until Alex noticed a middle-aged man hovering in the background wherever they went. ‘I saw him when we came out of your apartme
nt,’ he said. ‘And he’s still hanging round now.’

  Sophie looked over and couldn’t see him. ‘Look, he’s turned his back on us now. He’s buying something from the Currywurst stall,’ said Alex.

  She laughed. ‘Probably an old pervert. Gets his thrills from following young couples about. Forget about him.’

  They walked home soon afterwards. As they reached the entrance to her apartment she handed over a square package wrapped in brown paper.

  ‘Don’t let anyone see it,’ she whispered. ‘Grandma brought it back from West Berlin. It’s definitely not music the Party would approve of. I wouldn’t dream of playing it in the house if my parents were around.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Alex.

  ‘You’ll see!’

  Alex felt hard cardboard through the brown paper. His eyes lit up. ‘You have the sleeve too?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Grandma got it through no problem. This one has no picture of the group on it. And no title too. There’s no writing on the cover at all. The guards thought it looked harmless.’

  It was the records where the group on the cover had really long hair and wore hippy clothes that vexed the border guards.

  ‘How much did she pay?’

  ‘A couple of Marks. I tell her what to look for and she gets them from second-hand stalls.’

  Alex was doubly curious now. He had rarely seen a Western rock album in its sleeve. Forbidden music usually came in a plain paper inner sleeve with just the vinyl record to tell you what it was. No details. Nothing to give it away.

  ‘Be careful who hears it, Alex.’

  When Alex went to bed that night, he wedged the waste paper bin against the door. Carefully removing the square package from under his bed, he gingerly slipped the record out to study it under the glare of his reading lamp.

  Alex was puzzled by the cover. It looked like a folk music album. As Sophie had said, it had no lettering, just a small, framed oil painting of an old man with a bundle of sticks on his back that was hanging on a wall with peeling wallpaper. You could open the cover out like a book and on the back you could see the wall belonged to a partly demolished house. Beyond lay wasteland and wintry sky, and a tower block as bleak as anything in East Berlin.

  On the grey inner sleeve were strange rune-like symbols which whispered of the occult. That made sense to Alex. What he held was forbidden knowledge. Then there was a list of titles. ‘Black Dog’, ‘Rock and Roll’ – words he recognised.

  Alex scrutinised the sparse information for meaning. Headley Grange, Hampshire. Island Studios, London. Sunset Sound, Los Angeles. Were these places where the record was made? He pictured these forbidden cities, imagining sun-drenched streets with people who dressed how they liked and wore their hair as long they wanted.

  On the label of the vinyl record he saw the words Led Zeppelin. They were his favourite group. He loved how they could be ‘heavy’ on one song, and light and airy on the next. Alex had heard they had travelled all over the world – apart from the communist countries. He couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than being their guitarist, Jimmy Page. And he bet Jimmy lived somewhere where you didn’t have to lug coal up six flights of stairs and have a shower in a tub in the kitchen.

  As he slid the disc back into the sleeve he felt something else inside. It was a colour photograph snipped from a magazine of two men on a stage – curling towards each other like circling cats. One had a mass of blond ringlets and although he wore a girl’s floral blouse he reminded Alex of a Viking marauder. That must be the singer, Robert Plant. The other carried a Les Paul guitar slung low on his hips. He was rake thin, had a great mop of dark wavy hair and a matador jacket embroidered with red poppies. So that was what Jimmy Page looked like! If both of them appeared in East Berlin, they would have been attacked on the street.

  A record like this could fetch two hundred Marks on the black market – four or five months’ rent. And he was going to hear it for nothing! But he’d have to wait until his parents were out. And he would use their new headphones. These were difficult to get hold of but Frank knew the right people. Headphones meant you could listen as loud as you liked and not have to worry about the neighbours. Alex lay awake wondering what Led Zeppelin had produced this time. Then he drifted off to sleep listening to the guard dogs howling at the Wall.

  The next morning both his parents went out to play football and hockey for their work teams. They were always doing something communal like that – offering their services to paint the school windows, rattling collection boxes for North Vietnam – Alex wondered how they found the time. As soon as they had left he showed his acquisition to Geli. She adored the magazine photograph. ‘I’d love to work at a concert like that . . . all those lights and shapes.’

  Alex was impatient to hear his record. The pop and crackle of the needle on vinyl filled his headphones with the first track, ‘Black Dog’. Then came a strange clinking sound, like a machine being wound up, swiftly interrupted by the singer, then the rest of the band lumbered in with a great anaconda of a riff that snaked and slithered around in his head, the drums clanking and thudding like an old steam engine. Alex could not understand how men wearing women’s blouses could make music that lurched and juddered like a prehistoric beast in heat.

  Geli and Alex spent the rest of the morning listening again and again, enthralled. Alex wondered what it would be like to walk the streets of London, Los Angeles, and even Headley Grange, Hampshire, wherever that was.

  Chapter 10

  On his way to school on Monday morning, Alex waited at the corner of the park for Sophie. He felt the crisp cold in his throat and watched his breath curl away in the bright winter sunshine. He couldn’t believe his luck. A lovely girl. Fantastic music. It was a potent combination.

  She came running up to him and he held open his arms to hug her. Checking they were out of anyone’s earshot, Alex said, ‘Led Zeppelin! Wow!! Just brilliant!!! Does your grandma often get you records?’

  ‘Big secret,’ she said.

  Then she decided to tell him. ‘She’s done it a few times. I tell her what to look for. Usually she’ll slip it inside the sleeve of something innocuous, like Tom Jones or Bert Kaempfert. But she didn’t need to with this one.

  ‘You hold on to it. Keep it as long as you like. I play it every time my parents go out. I need to give it a rest.’

  Alex told her he was going to call his group Black Dog after the first song on the record.

  ‘So you’re still going to play, without Holger?’ said Sophie.

  ‘Suppose so,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t see why we should stop.’

  Sophie told him her parents thought she only listened to classical music. But she was sure they would disapprove if they knew the truth. Alex could sympathise. His parents hadn’t banned him from listening to Western rock music, but they made it plain they didn’t like it.

  His dad was funny like that. ‘Ach, do what you must,’ he would say when he and Geli put some forbidden rock music on the family record player. ‘We are not the Gestapo. But play it quietly. I don’t want the neighbours to complain.’ Sometimes, when it was too ‘heavy’, like that Black Sabbath record they’d borrowed, he asked them to take it off. They had an instinct for what the Party would and would not tolerate.

  ‘Hey, by the way, Mutter and Vater have asked if you would come for tea next Sunday,’ said Alex. ‘Do you mind?’

  She smiled. ‘Of course not.’

  Frank and Gretchen were keen to meet Sophie. They knew her parents from Party meetings and had seen her around the school. They thought she was a good match for their Alex. And knowing people like the Kirschs would certainly be useful.

  Over in Normannenstrasse, another item of evidence arrived for Alex Ostermann’s container.

  Subject continues to make openly hostile comparisons of DDR and Federal Republic, displaying delusional bourgeois aspirations. False consciousness undoubtedly further corrupted by Western broadcasts which he openly admits to observing. Conce
rn expressed regarding potentially negative influence on Sophie Kirsch, daughter of Arnd and Katherina Kirsch, whose loyalty to DDR is beyond question. Recommend close monitoring.

  The week passed quickly and on Friday evening, as they walked home from school, Alex asked Sophie if they could hook up, just the two of them, before she came round to meet his parents.

  Sunday itself was a damp, cold day. Alex and Sophie shivered as they trudged through the drifts of dead leaves in the park and hoped the rain would hold off.

  ‘How’s the band going?’ she asked

  ‘We’re playing again next Thursday,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t think we’ll look for another guitarist. It would be disloyal. And I still haven’t heard anything more about Holger.’

  ‘Maybe he got away?’ said Sophie.

  Alex took his courage in his hands and asked her an awkward question. He knew the answer would have a direct effect on what he thought about her.

  ‘What do you think about what the school says – that he’s a traitor for going?’

  She thought hard before she answered. ‘Mutter and Vater would say he was. He’s been looked after by the State. He’s been educated by the State and he should stay here to help build a good future for us all.’

  Alex wished he hadn’t asked. Then she leaned closer to him and whispered, ‘But I think he was brave to try to get away . . .’

  ‘Me too,’ said Alex. But he wasn’t going to say any more. What they were saying was treason. He was keen to change the subject. He started to tell her about his group. Sophie’s eyes glazed over. Alex recognised her expression. It was the one he put on in politics classes when he was pretending to be interested. And now it was starting to rain.

  ‘Enough about groups,’ she said with a steely look. ‘Let’s go in here.’ She steered him towards a church on the edge of the park.

  Alex liked churches. They were a peaceful oasis in the busy city.