by Arnold Zable
Andrei plays with a controlled fury. Out in the open we can discern the nuances: the artistry that extends beyond Paganini’s frenzied compositions, the variations in pace, and phrases in which each note can be heard with utter clarity. He moves effortlessly from bow to pizzicato, and returns to the bow for the crescendo. Beyond this small circle of friends extend the mysteries of the night, the dim outlines of trees and their shadows.
The final notes give way to a moment of stillness. Then the landscape formulates a reply that will outlive the music: a single bird call, the rustle and scurry of small things and, further afield, more imagined than heard, the hum of the marshes. And, suddenly, a chorus of frogs croaking in the swamplands.
The birds are taking up the roosts they had abruptly forsaken. The storks too are returning. Despite their size they land noiselessly on the thatched roof, legs extended forward and, moments later, they perch on their massive nests, motionless. All is being restored to order. The onslaught is over.
The Wall
Nina Simone, the descendant of slaves in North Carolina, is singing ‘Pirate Jenny’, a song about an enraged servant girl, written for an opera set in nineteenth-century London, and first performed in Berlin, in 1928. And I am listening to the song playing on a turntable in a wine bar in West Berlin, on an October night in 1986, on a day that had begun at dawn in Warsaw, as the Berlin express left the central station.
The train had broken free from the underground tube into the city fringes, hurtling past apartment buildings where crows perch on chimneys and TV antennae, and into the countryside past fields with bales of hay and ploughed furrows, past clusters of birch and forests of conifers, the morning frosts lifting—images I had seen over the previous three months of travel across the length of the Soviet Empire from Beijing to Moscow, and via Warsaw back to the borderlands of eastern Poland.
The train had slowed at the East German frontier to that strained silence that ensues before the boarding of frontier police, the stillness broken by dogs snarling, the bark of voices and the crunch of boots on gravel. And within seconds the carriage was swarming with uniformed men in jackboots, three in my compartment: one sullen, a second inflated with anger, the third smiling like a contented lover.
One of them stood over me, scrutinising my passport. He was sizing me up, his eyes moving between my face and the photo, while his colleagues poked torches beneath the seats and overhead at the luggage racks. The officer continued his inspection, directing me to open my backpack, rifling through my belongings, scattering my possessions over the seat as if upending a bag of rubbish.
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it was over. The police were gone, our passports stamped, transit visas granted, leaving us to pass through a country that had become a vast prison, and a mystery—the passengers insulated within the fast-moving train from the passing landscape and its people.
But the carriages could not entirely shield us from glimpses of everyday incidents, mundane rituals: elderly men and women sunning themselves on wooden benches; a solitary woman tending a village graveyard; two men seated at a card table on a station platform, deep in concentration over a game of chess; school children walking hand in hand on a village pathway; a man riding a bicycle on a country road, head bent low against the wind under an avenue of poplars.
Mid-afternoon I caught my first sight of the Berlin Wall from a carriage window. From this distance, and from the height of the railway embankment, the wall appeared smaller than I had anticipated. My expectations had been inflated by the mystique that had enveloped the wall during the quarter of a century since workers began laying the barbed wire barriers that would seal off West Berlin from escaping East German citizens.
At the West Berlin station there were no border troops or customs officials. No one was remotely interested in my documents. I stepped from the station into the city with a heady lightness, as if let loose after months of confinement.
West Berlin on first impression, in sharp contrast to the city I had left that morning, was an assault of competing choices, brazen and anarchic. Naked women winked from billboards; shop windows blazed with designer-label fashions. Music blared from shopping emporiums. Neon signs blinked the colour spectrum. This is a city, I had heard said, that knows how to party.
I continued walking as the evening chill descended, finding my way, disoriented, to the wine bar, where I listen to the strident voice of Nina Simone, recorded in live performance. Her singing is savage and urgent. She has bent Bertolt Brecht’s libretto to her own image. She is Pirate Jenny as a black servant girl, down on her knees in a rundown hotel, in a racist southern town, scrubbing the floor, while her masters are smirking and gawking. Her voice is an accusation, her singing an act of defiance.
The song takes hold of me and accompanies my hours of walking, my inspection of the wall with its scrawls and inscriptions, artworks and graffiti, its brooding presence. Since the divide was established, the barbed wire had been fortified with electric fences and reinforced concrete, and an inner fence marking off a stretch of no-man’s-land. Up to one hundred metres in width, this stretch had become known as the ‘death strip’.
I seek out vantage points from which to see the faces of the armed guards who stand, guns at the ready, in watchtowers. The sun reflects off their binoculars. The drab buildings beyond them are wrapped in mystery. The sentry boxes look out over the wall into the death strip, a sharp reminder of the dire consequences of escaping.
Yet many had tried: jumping from apartment windows, digging tunnels from cellars and graveyards, building cars low enough to drive beneath the traffic barriers, crashing trucks through the gates and fences. Smuggling themselves out in car boots and hidden compartments. Firing arrows from a rooftop attached to a nylon cord, swinging over on pulleys. Stitching a hot-air balloon from scraps of curtains and bedding, flying ultra-lights. And many had been killed or maimed fleeing for their lives through a barrage of searchlights and bullets, over anti-vehicle trenches and barbed wire barriers.
It is four decades since the Second World War ended, and twenty-five years since the wall was erected, and yet the conflict is not over. World war had been supplanted by cold war, countries split apart, families divided. And there is talk of odd things happening in the death strip, of rodents and wild rabbits that have colonised this narrow stretch of wasteland, and are feeding on its wild grasses. But their sojourn may soon be ended. There are whispers of a day of reckoning, when the wall will be torn apart and the concrete hacked to rubble. Talk of dictators being sent packing, the apparatus of surveillance disassembled, and of old scores being exposed and settled.
And all the while Nina Simone is singing of vengeance. She is a servant girl gritting her teeth and grinning, biding her time, dreaming of the black freighter with the skull and crossbones on its masthead making its way into the harbour. She is waiting for the coming of her redeemers. Her deliverance.
Her voice accompanies me at dawn several days later as I walk from my hotel room towards the station. It is raining and a cold wind is howling. I am haunted by the wall, its solidity, and the contrast between the two sides: one blank and devoid of colour, the other layered with caricatures of dictators, slogans and profanities, tags and scribbles, declarations of love, mini treatises on freedom. Haunted too by infamous images of the wall when under construction, slicing the heart of the city, cutting off brother from sister, child from parent, fracturing families who stood in clusters, waving to each other across the divide, clutching kerchiefs, weeping.
I hear the song’s rhythms in the movement of the train, which is taking me back into East Germany. Border troops patrol the corridors. Vast tracts of woodland are alight with autumn reds and auburns. Vines cascade down mountainsides as we approach yet another no-man’s-land: a strip of earth that cuts through a forest. We pass one last strand of barbed wire, a final surveillance post, and the train is through the last passport inspection point into West Germany.
At the first station after the border
a woman walks along the platform handing out paper cups of tea to those who lean out of the windows. The train moves through the Bavarian countryside, past mediaeval towns and hamlets surrounded by field and forest. The landscape is well ordered, symmetrical, the land green and fertile. And within the hour I am walking through the streets of Nuremburg, address in hand, to an apartment on the edge of the inner city.
Anna is expecting me, but I have barely had time to set down my bags when she is urging me out, walking with me to a university cinema, to a showing of Murneau’s 1920s black-and-white classic, Faustus, the tale of an elderly necromancer and alchemist, and his infamous pact with the devil. The film is shot in light and shadow, alternately illuminating and concealing facades and faces, accentuating the battle between good and evil, salvation and temptation. The student audience groans when the final word, liebe, appears on the screen, signalling the triumph of love. It is all too easy, they say, too simple.
‘Welcome to Nuremburg,’ says Anna on the way back to her apartment. She is aware of the lingering effect of the film, its bleak images, and the apt initiation that Faustus has provided for my brief stay in the city. She had planned it.
We had met months ago in the first weeks of my journey, as fellow travellers on an overnight train heading from southern China to Beijing. Even then, in our few hours of conversation, on hard seats in a crowded third-class compartment, I had observed her restlessness and learned of her obsession with her father and his former comrades and drinking companions.
‘He was so kind to me when I was young,’ she says, as if taking up a conversation that had been temporarily interrupted, disembarking at the Beijing station. A woman in her late twenties, Anna’s English is correct, if somewhat formal. ‘He was such a sweet and doting father, but when I was thirteen he began to control me. He accused me of being a cheap flirt and tried to prevent me from seeing my boyfriend. He watched my movements as if he were my keeper.
‘He would come in at night, sit on my bed and ramble on for hours about his former girlfriends, trying to impress me, to ingratiate himself. “I am so tired,” he would say. “Everything I do is for you,” he claimed. He was such a weary, beaten man, with the eyes of a cornered animal.
‘I just wanted him to go away, to let me be. I began to suspect that he harboured a secret, a sinister past he shared with his drinking companions. I ran away from the town I was raised in as if from the devil, and came to Nuremberg. I fell in love with the city, and the freedom it offered me.
‘It was a crazy, wonderful time. I studied nursing, had my share of lovers, and came to know these streets and the city’s Renaissance history. Nuremberg was a centre for craftsmen and artists, free thinkers and progressives, a city of the Reformation. I fell in love with Albrecht Dürer, with his woodcut prints and engravings, his altarpieces. Such intricate beauty. Such precision. You must see his work. Tomorrow we will visit his house and workshop.’
Anna pauses. The animation drains from her face like a photo returning to its negative. I do not know what has brought it about, but in the ensuing days I will come to see the pattern of her oscillations—the freedom in her movement, and an air of worldliness acquired from years of travel and introspection, succumbing, without notice, to bouts of doubt and obsession.
‘Just when I thought I had secured my independence,’ she says, ‘my father came to fetch me. He forced me into his car and threatened to beat me. He drove wildly through the city. His body was trembling with anger. It was to be the last time. I searched the passing streets for an opening. This was my advantage. The city was my ally. For the first time in my father’s presence I was calm and calculating.
‘At a red light I opened the door and jumped out and disappeared into the alleys I knew so well, and as I ran, I was laughing. Everything seemed comical: the gothic buildings, the sight of my shoes hurrying over the cobblestones, and the earnest, hard-working citizens hurrying by. I couldn’t stop laughing.
‘Nuremburg is beautiful, don’t you think?’ she says, her spirits lifting. We do not want to let go of the night. The pavements are dimly lit by streetlamps. Buildings follow the natural contours of the river. Flowers spill from window boxes. Cathedral spires pierce the heavens. Flights of steps spiral up to the ramparts of a castle.
The city was reconstructed from the ruins left after the allied air raids, Anna tells me. The carpet-bombing had reduced Nuremberg to debris. The mediaeval centre was destroyed. Thousands of citizens were killed or displaced. The survivors reconstructed the cobbled streets and landmark buildings, stone by stone, brick by brick. Within a decade almost all had been restored to its pre-war grandeur. All is correct, all is in order.
Yet Pirate Jenny is seething. She is on her knees, scrubbing and cleaning. Silently scheming. And the gentlemen are barking: Hey gal, finish them floors! Get upstairs! What’s wrong with you? Earn your keep here! They are tossing their tips, proud of their largesse, condescending. They cannot see that the servant girl is furtively glancing at the harbour. She is looking out for the black freighter, biding her time, planning her day of reckoning.
And Anna, too, is not done yet. The ghosts are returning. She reminds me that Nuremberg was the spiritual centre of Nazism, the backdrop to Hitler’s imperial aspirations, his dreams of a Reich that would impose its rule for a millennium.
‘If you want to meet the former Nazis,’ she says, ‘I can show you the pubs where they drink and play cards. Harmless men like my uncle, turning old and senile.’ Again the vibrancy is draining from her face. Her speech slows. The tone has flattened. She speaks as if she is elsewhere.
‘You know, my grandmother helped a Jewish friend escape before the war. She was photographed and her photo was published in one of the party’s rags with the caption, ‘Jew lover’. My uncle, her son-in-law, and fourteen years her junior, came to the house whip in hand and flogged her.
‘I don’t know exactly how old I was when I heard this story, but it deeply distressed me. I could no longer feel proud of who I was, of my family, my country. There were so many secrets. I did not want to think ill of my uncle. I did not want to see him as someone capable of such horror. As a child I loved him. I loved to play with him. He brought me sweets and presents. He was kind and gentle. He was good with children. And he was a Nazi.’
The following morning we take a train three kilometres southeast to the edge of the city, the site of the infamous rallies. We are dwarfed by our surroundings—the vast assembly areas, the Zeppelin field, the Great Road, and the grounds of the former Hitler Youth stadium—confronted by the circular Congress Hall, built in the image of the Roman Colosseum. It stands before our eyes, solid yet crumbling, built to last, now decaying.
We approach the tiered Tribune. One hundred and fifty metres long, in its days of glory it was flanked by gold eagles, the cobblestone terrace lined with two rows of torch pillars. Fourteen pylons remain standing, decomposing. The sheer scale of the rally grounds and its structures overwhelms us.
The site conjures the menacing spectacle of the masses that first assembled here in 1927 and continued assembling annually over the ensuing decade: devotees of a blood cult marching in torchlight processions, black shirts and brown shirts bearing a flag said to be soaked in the blood of one of the Beer Hall Putsch rebels. And marching with them, steel-helmeted soldiers and entranced civilians, armies of the night arrayed in perfect symmetry—arms outstretched in robotic unison, paying homage to the Fuehrer.
The ritual marked an era of genocide and horror, and among its victims were my four grandparents, two shot, two gassed, along with many of their children, and their extended families. An entire community. I look again, and see the site as it is on this cool autumn day, an ageing edifice to delusions of grandeur.
Anna is visibly anguished. ‘There are times I want to run to the ends of the earth,’ she says, ‘and be rid of the sweet old men who so easily committed murder. I see their eyes and hands crawling over my skin, invading my being. They pursue me in my dreams, begg
ing me to return to the fold. In one instant they are kind, in the next, grotesque. They are my own flesh and blood and I want to forgive them. But I think of the deeds they must have committed, and I cannot. I dream of my father and uncle, one on each arm: my captors.
‘My father now says he would do anything for me, that he is proud of my achievements. “Do you have enough money?” he asks. “Do you have enough to eat? Can I get you a drink?” He comes to me contrite and pathetic, with flowers, and tempts me to feel sorry for him. He wants me to love him, to turn back the clock and be his little daughter.
‘My uncle and father—their sickly sweet presence, their secrets—this is why I am always running, getting out, but always returning. There are times, when I am far away, that I am sure I have finally outrun their shadow. But no matter how far and how long I travel, I find myself back in Nuremberg, the city where I first sensed freedom.
‘Then, within months, it palls again. I cannot get rid of my confusion: Nuremberg, of the rallies, Nuremberg, the place of my liberation. I know all too well where the ageing comrades meet with my father and uncle. I dream of bursting into their places where they sit over their beers and secrets, and tear to shreds their silences. I want them to tell me straight what they did, and be done with it. I have imagined the scene many times, my day of reckoning, but I know I can’t do it. Instead I flee.’
Anna’s torment verges on rage, and Pirate Jenny is counting the heads even as she’s making the beds, because she knows that nobody’s going to sleep here tonight, nobody. And there’s a scream in the night and you see her staring out the window. The ship, the black freighter is turning in the harbour, and Jenny is rejoicing, because the guns will wipe the smile off the gentlemen’s faces, and this whole damn place is going to be burnt to the ground. Only this cheap hotel will remain safe and sound.
