Time and a Ticket

by Peter Benchley

  "Yes."

  "Okay, he's waving."

  We continued down the street, walking on the sidewalk and peering at the bricked windows and doors, trying to see inside. Suddenly a policeman ran up to Mr. Potter, gave him a courtesy salute, and began speaking excitedly in German. Mr. Potter said something, and the policeman crossed to the other side of the street.

  Mr. Potter turned to us. "We'll have to get off this side of the street."

  "Why?" asked Bob.

  "The police don't like to have people walk on this side. There's always a chance we'll get shot, and—"

  "Shot! You mean they'd just lean over the wall and shoot us, here in West territory?"

  "They've done it, and then claimed you were walking in their territory. Technically, they're right. This sidewalk, or part of it, is in East Berlin. But the real danger isn't from bullets. It's from bricks. That's their favorite."

  "How do you mean?" said Bob.

  "When the Wall first went up, a number of people were killed along here by bricks which 'dislodged' themselves from rooftops and fell on their heads. There's no way to prove that the brick didn't just fall. Of course, a red brick falling from a gray building is a little strange, but still, there's no proof."

  We hurried to the other side of the street, and walked back to the car. "Now we'll go look at some Nazi ruins," said Mr. Potter. "We'll see as much as we can today, so you can spend tomorrow in East Berlin."

  The next morning, a cab came for us at ten o'clock. The driver was told to drop us at Friedrichstrasse, a block away from the American checkpoint, Checkpoint Charlie. Bob debated taking his camera, then decided to leave it, since he knew that taking photographs was illegal in most of East Berlin, and he was not anxious to lose his camera. Or, for that matter, to be arrested.

  We asked the driver to take us past the canals, for Mr. Potter had told us that on Sundays one could get a better sense of what the Wall meant to the German people, and the canals were where the people met. We stopped near one, and Bob and I got out. Crowds of people stood on the bank, waving balloons, handkerchiefs, and pieces of colored cloth at the eastern shore. A young couple had tied red balloons on the ends of sticks and were waving them back and forth over their heads. An old woman waved a handkerchief in a halfhearted, weary gesture, and from time to time she dabbed her eyes with it. A man held a child on his shoulders, and the child bounced happily up and down, clapping his hands.

  Across the canal, the Vopos had planted high hedges and put up four strands of barbed wire, so no one could get close enough to see the waving. Guards patrolled the wire to keep people moving and to stop crowds from gathering at the spaces between the hedges. In a window of one of the buildings a hundred yards or so back from the canal, someone appeared wearing a red shirt. He stayed at the window only a moment, then disappeared.

  On the way to the checkpoint, we drove down the Kurfurstendamm. The cafes were jammed with people drinking coffee and Coca-Cola and beer, reading the papers or talking and laughing with one another. The sun sparkled on the new buildings, giving the whole street an aura of gold.

  Before the border was closed, Friedrichstrasse was like any other street in Berlin. It consisted of blocks of stores and apartment houses, some in East Berlin, some in West Berlin. When the Wall went up, things changed. Now an American guardhouse stands in the middle of the street by the border. It is surrounded by sandbag barricades, manned at all times by two or three soldiers. The rest of the troops, and the tanks, are stationed less than a block behind the border. The houses directly on the border have been evacuated. The apartment house on the left, facing East Berlin, has no windows, only sandbags which support the barrel of a heavy machine gun.

  The East Germans, always alert to prevent escapes, had leveled their side of the checkpoint and set up flags where buildings used to be. The only building they left was one small house just across the line from the windowless house in the American sector. They use this house for their checkpoint.

  West German police and American soldiers were milling around the American guardhouse as we went in. An American sergeant in battle dress took our passports and wrote down our names and numbers. He asked us when we planned to return to the West, and we said two o'clock. That gave us three hours to wander on foot through East Berlin. He noted the time of departure and the estimated time of arrival in a big notebook, and said, "Don't be too late, or we'll have to start looking for you over there."

  We left the guardhouse and walked the fifty yards to the East German checkpoint. A green-uniformed Vopo stopped us in front of the building. "Your passport," he said, and we handed him our passports. He passed them through a slit cut in a drawn window shade, and suddenly I experienced a slight sinking feeling, a feeling of helplessness. I remembered Mr. Potter's remarks about Hans, and I had a picture of a little man with a blackjack dealer's eyeshade, poring over a huge ledger looking for my name among hundreds of "wanted" names in the American community. Then, through the slit, the passport was handed back.

  The first large street we came to was Unter den Linden, which used to be the main street of East Berlin. We stopped on a corner and looked up and down the street. "You remember that woman on the train?" said Bob. " 'I don't know where the people is. The people is gone.' " On the whole street we could see three people. They were not dawdling, not stopping to chat. They walked with their heads down, and they walked fast.

  We walked on, looking in shop windows. In a meat market, one lone string of sausage hung in the window. The rest of the hooks were empty. We put our faces to the window and looked at the cases inside. We could see two trays of pig's knuckles, and two more strings of sausage. I remembered what someone had told me about East Berlin. The phrase in markets, he said, was not "I will have ..." but "Do you by any chance have . . . ?" An East German girl he knew had gone into a meat market one day and asked if there was any stewmeat.

  "Of course," said the butcher, and he took a piece of red meat from a hook on the wall and hacked off a piece.

  The next day she went back to the market and asked if there were any cuts of good beefsteak.

  "Of course," said the butcher, and he took the same piece of meat from the same hook and cut her a slice from the same end.

  As we walked along, I began to feel uneasy. There was something different about East Berlin, aside from the lack of people, and I couldn't put my finger on what it was. There was less traffic than in West Berlin, and less of a variety of makes of cars, but that wasn't it. Nor was it the fact that there was not an excessive number of policemen about. Suddenly Bob discovered what it was.

  "Hey," he said, looking up. "Is the sun still shining?"

  The sun was indeed still shining, and there were no clouds in the sky, yet the whole atmosphere was that of a cloudy, dreary day. There was no color. Nothing shone, nothing glittered. There were no whites to reflect the sun and gleam in your eye, no yellows to draw your attention, no greens or blues or pinks to bring the city to life. There were only two colors, gray and reddish gray—gray in the buildings that were standing, reddish gray in the charred ruins of the bombed-out areas that no one had repaired. The government had made one attempt to atone for this lack of color: on the side of perhaps one building every two or three blocks they had hung red propaganda banners. "Western Revanchists Must Go." ''Berlin—Free City." "The Only Wish of the DDR Is Peace."

  We walked past the university, past the ruins of the old Reichstag, and came eventually to the showplace of East Berlin, Karl Marx Allee, whose name, before the recent change of heart, had been Stalinallee. It was here that Bob and I both wished he had brought his camera. The buildings, all of them new, were only one deep on each side of the street. They were an off-white gray, and the oldest of them were already sorely in need of repair. But as drab as they were, they stood like castles before the debris and tenements nearby.

  "What do you call that style?" said Bob. "Neo-Communist austere?"

  Some of the buildings on Karl Marx Allee were not fin
ished, but were only facades, and though they looked respectable enough from the street in front, from a distance they looked like stage sets.

  We were hungry, and we thought of getting something to hold us until we crossed back into West Berlin. There were no restaurants in sight, and we didn't remember having seen any so far, but going on the theory that even Communists have to eat, we assumed there was a restaurant somewhere. Suddenly it occurred to us that we had no East German money, and we knew that East Germans were not allowed to accept West marks. We had been warned against buying any East marks at the border, for the government of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik had established a one-for-one exchange rate that was totally unrealistic. An East mark was worth approximately one-fifth of a West mark, so for a dollar we would get in exchange only twenty cents. Not only would we lose on the exchange, we had been told, but all our East marks would be confiscated before we left, and we would be given nothing in return. The East Germans wanted hard currencies, and they couldn't afford to let their own currency get out of the country and be held by another government as trade credit. We decided not to eat.

  We walked farther, through the dark, empty streets, until we saw a sign on a building in French, English, and German that said there was an exhibition inside that gave the history of the DDR in pictures. We went in and spent half an hour looking at photographs of Nazi brutalities and at East German editorial cartoons excoriating the West. The stock character representing the West was a fat man in a top hat, tailcoat, and striped pants. He had saw teeth and long claws, and he was invariably gobbling up the poor, raggedy, sad-eyed peasants. In the next box he was being stabbed in the rear by a pitchfork held by the same peasants, who were now firm-jawed, clean-cut, and hard-muscled.

  When we left the exhibition, we walked back toward the border, for it was after one, and we did not want to be late and perhaps cause an incident. At the border, we did not pass through as easily as on the way in. We were ushered into a small room, where a thin, mustachioed man sat behind a desk. A Vopo stood beside him. The man nodded, and the Vopo took our passports and passed them through an opening in the wall. The thin man stood up.

  "Have you got any East marks?" he said.

  "No," said Bob. I shook my head.

  "Take off your coats. Have you got any East marks?"

  We both said we didn't have any East marks. We took off our raincoats.

  "Take off your jackets," said the man, as he put his hand in the pocket of my raincoat. "Are you sure you have no East marks?"

  "I'm sure," I said.

  He went through our jacket pockets. "Turn out your trouser pockets," he said. "Empty your wallets." We did as we were told, dumping the contents of our pockets on his desk. The man looked at Bob's pants pockets. He patted Bob's shirt pocket, and there was the sound of paper crumpling. "What have we here?" he said, smiling. He reached into Bob's shirt pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes. The smile died on his face.

  "Pall Mall," said Bob. "Outstanding—and, they are mild."

  "You can go," said the man. He reached through the hole in the wall and brought out our passports. He threw them on the desk.

  We dressed, and went outside. A man with a wide-brim hat and a black overcoat was standing outside the door holding a pile of booklets. "American?" he said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Here." He handed us each four booklets, and we put them in our pockets without looking at them.

  We took a taxi back to the Potters', and when we were comfortably ensconced in the library, cuddling glasses of strong spirits, we looked at the books. They were standard propaganda literature, most of them quite dull. One book, however, called A Central Problem, had photographs, some apparently doctored, some real, some presented out of context, and there was a text accompanying and explaining each picture. A few of its more spectacular passages follow:

  Along with the separate currency reform and the division of the city some Western politicians provoked the so-called "Berlin crisis," and installed the "air lift." The "Berlin Crisis" was engineered by them in order to distract attention from their policy of dividing Germany and Berlin. At the same time it contributed to creating the "front-line city atmosphere" which the German reactionaries and the Western powers need for their bridgehead policy.

  Crime statistics in West Berlin also illustrate the effects of systematic front-line policy propaganda. About two hundred crimes are committed every day in West Berlin. The number of young people sentenced in court increased from 2,999 in 1954 to 5,939 in 1957. The proportion of suicides is also higher in West Berlin than in any other city in the world. [Author's note: that figure is accurate—for cities. In 1959 West Berlin's suicide rate was 39 for every 100,000 people. However, East Germany's suicide rate of 28 per 100,000 was in that year the highest of any country in the world. Excluding West Berlin, West Germany's suicide rate was 18.7 per 100,000. The above are World Health Organization figures that appeared in the New York Times in January, 1962.]

  The security measures taken on the borders of West Berlin [the construction of the Wall] on August 13, 1961, by the government of the German Democratic Republic, in agreement with the Governments of the Warsaw Pact States, do not affect the regulations for traffic and supervision on the communications between West Berlin and West Germany. These measures to maintain peace and to protect the German Democratic Republic, particularly its capital, Berlin, and to ensure the security of other socialist states, remain in force until the conclusion of a German peace treaty.

  We left for Paris the next afternoon. While we were waiting for a cab to come for us, we showed Mr. and Mrs. Potter the propaganda books we had been handed at the border. Mr. Potter leafed through A Central Problem, and set it down on the coffee table. "You know," he said, "as funny and absurd as this stuff seems to anyone who knows better, there's a lot of danger in it. The danger is for the young people, and it gets worse each day. Every day more people die who knew other values and remembered other times, times when a system wasn't forced on them. And every day more people are born who can't know anything but what's told to them by their government. As long as some of the people who remember are alive, there's always a possibility— slim, I'll giant you, but still a possibility—that they'll rise up and do something about it. But the possibility is made slimmer with every death and every birth. Physiologically, the exchange is balanced, one for one. Ideologically, it's grossly unbalanced. It's the death of a free mind and the birth of a mind that will never be free."

  The cab arrived, and Bob and I thanked Mr. and Mrs. Potter and drove off to the station. As we crossed the East German border for the last time, I looked out the window and saw a group of the blue-suited Communist youth corps marching in formation. Not one of the children looked more than sixteen.

  8

  We spent my last weekend in France with a friend, at his family's house on the Loire. It was to be a partridge-shooting wine-tasting weekend, but the latter took precedence over the former, and all pretensions about hunting were dropped when I shot a seventy-five foot barn.

  I sold the Peugeot in the beginning of December, after two costly trips to the casinos at Forge les Eaux and Enghien-les-Bains where I tried to play James Bond and break the table at chemin de fer. Once I wore a single black glove, thinking that luck might smile on such a man of mystery. Smersh won out every time, however, and I threw my glove away in dismal defeat. Had I been in the area, I would have cast it into the Bosporus. As it was, I was forced to settle for the Seine.

  I left Paris on the 19th of December. Bob was at school. I left him a note and some money to cover my half of December's rent, and took a cab to the station. It was a cloudless day, with a deep blue winter sky, and as I rode down the Quai St. Michel, I looked across the river and saw the sunlight dancing off the water and soaking the houses on the right bank in a white-gold glow. It was a sharper color than I had seen as I flew in in July, for now the air was crisp and cold and gave none of the shimmering softness that heat gives to su
nlight. I spoke aloud the last line of "La Seine," ". . . car la Seine est une amante, et son amant c'est Paris." The cab driver turned and looked at me as though he thought I had taken leave of my senses.

  I spent two leisurely weeks in Madrid with some friends of my parents. Then, in the beginning of January, when the cold in Spain had become unbearable, I went south to Alge-ciras, across the bay from Gibraltar, to wait for the Saturnia, on which my parents were sailing to Naples. I bought a tourist-class ticket for the voyage from Gibraltar to Naples. The ticket cost $38 and was, minute for minute and mile for mile, the cheapest traveling I had done.

  For the next four weeks I played the happy tourist. I went sightseeing with my parents in Rome, grew fat on Italian food, went sightseeing with my parents in Athens, grew thin on Greek food, flew back to Rome and saw St. Peter's tomb, and got fat again on Italian food.

  On the 10th of February, I flew from Rome to Cairo, hoping that Charlie Ravenel had somehow managed to get there too. Months earlier, we had agreed to meet at the Nile Hilton Hotel, the only landmark in Cairo that we both knew. The plane left in the late afternoon, and as it flew southeast across the Mediterranean, I could see the sun move down in the sky. First the sky was blue, then dark blue, then navy blue as the sun settled for a moment on the horizon, a red ball, squat and glowing. Then all at once it disappeared, and the plane flew on in darkness.

  During the flight, I thought of what I was about to throw myself into. I was prepared, I believed, for new places, new customs, and new people. I had considered how new and how different life in the East would be, and though I had never known real discomfort or squalor or dirt or heat, for some reason the prospects didn't bother me. I was excited rather than worried, curious rather than afraid.

  What I was not sure of was how I would get along with Ravenel. For the first week or two, Bob and I had had to exert a great effort to be patient with each other, to learn about and try to understand each other. I had known Bob in college and for a year had even roomed in the same suite with him. But we had never lived in close quarters, and neither of us, it turned out, was just peaches and cream. But within a short time, perhaps because of our many similarities, perhaps even because of our differences, we settled down to a fine understanding. There were never any serious clashes of personality, just the occasional annoyances caused by two individuals exercising their day-to-day quirks and mannerisms. On the whole, we got along superbly.