A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  There were so many bars. We thought we would go into one, called the Old-timer. We thought it might have more retired National Socialists in it for our entertainment (I’ve since learnt that ‘old-timer’ is what Germans call vintage cars). In fact, it was a gay bar, which we realized, embarrassingly, after we had ordered two beers. For different reasons we had to get through the following half-hour without referring to this. We spent the time going over our planned itinerary, in more detail than we probably needed to. Our heads were lowered over the sheet of paper, which I had in my jacket pocket in an envelope – the Reisebüro would need to look at it the next day. It should not be crumpled.

  We walked back to the Pension Dittberner, with a lot of pauses to consult the map. We were two or three streets away when Ogden suddenly said, ‘What do you think happened to her?’

  Perhaps sometimes people have a telepathic sense of what old friends are referring to, and not just in films. In reality it is not so. I had no idea who Ogden was talking about.

  ‘I have to say – at the time I heard I couldn’t believe it. She changed her name at Oxford, didn’t she?’

  Then I understood. He was talking about Tracy Cartwright.

  ‘A lot of people changed their name,’ I said. ‘It was a weird kind of Oxford thing.’

  ‘But she kept it up afterwards. It must be hard,’ Ogden said. ‘I mean, you’ve had twenty years of hearing people say, “Tracy,” when they want you. I mean, if I said I wanted to be called Stephen I wouldn’t automatically respond when I heard the name. I just wouldn’t. What did she want to be called?’

  ‘Alexandra,’ I said. There was something sad about the change of name, let alone how the story had finished. I didn’t see her after the first term – in the end Tracy wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with someone like me. Not just because I would probably have forgotten and called her Tracy. It took me a day to realize what had happened. The girl who had died, in a shared flat in London, was called Alexandra Cartwright. That was not someone I knew. It was a year after we’d left university. I didn’t understand until the evening I opened the door of the flat and found James Frinton standing there apologetically. In my memory he is holding a hat in both hands, but I think that is just what the bearers of bad news do in films. I hadn’t seen him for years, either. He had come, he said, because he couldn’t think who else there might be to let me know that Tracy had died.

  ‘These things happen,’ I said weakly.

  ‘I couldn’t work out,’ Ogden said, ‘whether it was because she had turned herself into someone completely different – into Alexandra Cartwright with the smart friends and the ballgowns and stuff – or whether it had happened because she was always like that. I can’t remember any more whether she was always crazy. She was an anarcho-syndicalist. But I don’t suppose she was even that towards the end.’

  ‘Why were you thinking about her all of a sudden?’ I said.

  ‘Seeing you, I suppose,’ Ogden said. We were at the pension. I produced the key to the street door, though it was not particularly late. Frau Dittberner was probably still around to let us in. ‘Partly that and partly, I guess, seeing those kids at the bus station earlier.’

  ‘But she wasn’t like them,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t injecting heroin behind bus shelters. It was all – oh, I don’t know. I hadn’t seen her for years.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ Ogden said, ‘she died and those kids at the bus station, they’re still alive.’

  I didn’t think that Ogden’s argument was as much of an unanswerable point as he seemed to think. Of course the heroin users we had seen were alive. There were certainly plenty of heroin users who had hung around the Zoo Station in West Berlin who were now as dead as Tracy Cartwright. When it came to it, it would be hard to conclude that a dead Tracy Cartwright was more unfortunate than a dead Berlin heroin user of the sort we had seen. Ogden’s points of comparison were too selective. His argument was fundamentally unsound. In our room, I got quickly into my pyjamas while he was in the bathroom putting his on. We both read the books we had brought for a while. My reading was light, a classic German novel of the 1930s. His was a detailed history of the German Democratic Republic, written by an American historian and published by an American university press. Although the room was unfamiliar to both of us, it was clean. The beds were comfortable. The scene was quickly safe and agreeable, even domestic. I started to think that the tensions I had felt earlier and the awkwardness that had arisen once Tracy Cartwright had come up were superficial. They would soon disappear.

  Then

  the I

  was maybe school

  yes this was

  the school I was at and my

  brother there in the classroom my brother Joaquin having to learn to fly because because outside a group of tigers will get in and in here the doors being bolted the windows shut Tracy blocking gaps with thick black cloth and everywhere through a gap the mouth the teeth wet white shining the growl of a tiger and the phone in the classroom rings a tiger is in here somehow in here somehow and Joaquin turns and his eyes are wet with tears and he says because now I am going out and the sacrifice is mine it is not important and it must happen and he walks out and down and around me these people they celebrate but who are they where are the tigers and I hear downstairs a door opening and the noise of running tigers towards up

  and tigers towards

  and towards

  and

  I woke up. It was dark. The room was unfamiliar. I could hear snuffling breathing. I was gulping for breath in a panic. After a few moments I knew where I was. Some machine was making a hum, not in the room but not far from it. The sheets were crumpled under me. My pyjama top was around my armpits. I had thrashed around in my nightmare. I was in Berlin with Percy Ogden in the bed next to mine. Joaquin was safe in our flat in England. I waited until my heart had stopped pounding and I felt confident that the dream would not return. I closed my eyes. The next day we would make the final arrangements to travel into the German Democratic Republic. The day after that we would begin our interesting holiday. I opened my eyes. I shut my eyes. The blackness was the same in each case.

  We got up at half past seven. I washed and dressed first. I went to the breakfast room. It was a pleasant space with three tables already occupied, and a long side table laid with a variety of cold meat, cheeses, a large basket of bread and a small device with hot water to cook eggs in. The other guests were respectable German couples, talking in lowered voices. I ordered a pot of coffee from Frau Dittberner. In five minutes Ogden came into the room. He sat down.

  ‘It’s a change getting someone else to fetch your coffee,’ he said, when he had given his order. ‘It’s always me fetching Phil’s coffee in the morning. And for the rest of the team. I can do it blindfold now.’

  ‘Who’s doing the coffee while you’re away?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Phil’s in the constituency,’ Ogden said. ‘It’ll be his agent. Or even Marion. That’s his wife. Parliament’s in recess now.’

  Two more Germans entered the breakfast room, a small, dark, neat couple. The wife had a polished patent leather handbag over the crook of her arm in a curiously medicinal shade of pink-brown. ‘Guten Morgen,’ the man said confidently, and the three occupied tables all said, ‘Guten Morgen,’ back, echoed by the man’s wife. They sat down.

  ‘I didn’t say anything when I came in,’ Ogden said. ‘Did you say good morning?’

  ‘Well, no, I have to say I didn’t,’ I said. ‘It didn’t occur to me.’

  ‘It’s important to be polite,’ Ogden said, lighting a cigarette. ‘It’s going to be more important when we get to East Germany. It wouldn’t be right to behave as if we were in England and ignoring strangers. We’re going to a socialist country, remember? It’s all about belonging together. We should definitely say good morning to strangers. I’m going to start doing it when I get back.’

&nb
sp; The Reisebüro of East Germany opened its doors at nine o’clock. We were there at ten to nine. It was on the second floor of an anonymous office block in the back streets behind an enormous department store. I had not expected that. For some reason I had thought it would be in a shop, with windows carrying photographs of beaches and historic towns to lure people in. I had thought of Torremolinos. This was my first direct encounter with a socialist state. Back home, we had often talked about how a socialist state would function, but our concepts had been broad and principled. We had not really considered what it would be like to work for the state and hold a responsible job. As if to confirm the essential mystery of what it would mean, there was no noise behind the door and apparently no movement. A light was on, but no other signs of life. Just as I was starting to think we might have chosen to arrive on a holiday, there was a rattle of a key in the lock. The door was opened. It was nine a.m. precisely. The woman opening the door was in ordinary clothes. She walked back into the office around a screen without saying anything. We came in. We found ourselves facing a man wearing a grey uniform. He was sitting behind a desk, quite bare apart from three rolls of tickets, the sort you might use in a raffle, one red, one yellow and one white.

  ‘Next, please,’ he said.

  I had been practising. I said in German that we were undertaking a trip in East Germany. We required permission for a trip of two weeks, starting tomorrow. He tore off a ticket from the red roll. He drew out a drawer of his desk with careful attention, and gave us a form each. He indicated that we should go into the waiting room and fill in the form. We should wait until we were called.

  There was nobody else in the waiting room. Nobody else had been waiting behind us. Ogden took both forms and began to fill them in, so that the details would be the same on both. I found myself paying attention to the man who had given us our tickets – our tickets of admission, I found myself thinking, as if to a funfair or a place of entertainment. He and the woman who had opened the door were the first citizens of the DDR I had knowingly looked on. His uniform was clean, neat but frayed around the edges. I tried to reconstruct his day so far. I thought of him getting up with the aid of an old-fashioned alarm clock, and washing himself. I thought of him sponging himself down from a bowl of cold water by the side of the bed. For some reason he lived, in my imagination, in a sort of barracks. A wife in a pink nylon nightie lay with tousled blonde hair in the bed, ignoring the summons of the alarm. His uniform lay neatly on the back of a chair, white shirt, grey official tie, tunic, trousers, socks and the shoes he had polished last night before bed: he put them on quickly. He went through to the kitchen, turning on the kettle before brushing his teeth in the square, stained kitchen sink. Out of the kitchen window was a view of a bleak square of grass on which two chickens pecked behind a wire fence. He would collect any eggs when he got home in the evening. He made a cup of ersatz coffee from powder and dried milk. He took a piece of black bread from a wooden bread bin. He drank and ate standing up in the little kitchen, to save washing up: he leant over the sink while eating. Then he brushed himself down and rinsed the plain white mug. He left the flat.

  I looked at him. He was only a little older than we were. He was blond and square-faced, his jaw substantial and his eyes weakly blue. His cheeks were reddened as if he had stood in a brisk wind. There were no children of that marriage to say goodbye to, I decided.

  His journey: a walk through streets of high tenements with people heading in the same direction. Occasionally he would greet a colleague or an acquaintance or a friend of his parents, since he had grown up in this suburb, I felt. His greetings were formal, saying good morning to Frau Schoolmistress and Herr Engineer, Herr Doctor, Frau Architect, with a nod and no smile. Everybody in the state going to their purpose and accepting their duty, a place that worked.

  We had been waiting for some time now. I brushed away the thought that the guard in my head had a blonde sleeping wife who had no intention, it seemed, of undertaking any activity. He had left her sprawled and asleep. I could not think what she had done, or what she would be doing.

  But he was at the railway station now – yes, I was sure of this – holding a neat, polished briefcase. I reversed, I rewound: I made him pick it up before he left the kitchen. Those initials under the handle were his father’s; he had now retired from his job in the civil service. They would be proud of each other. He was standing on the platform. The train came in with a pleasantly familiar hum, the doors opening with an agreeable musical note, like a harp being plucked. He had been familiar with that all his life. It was busy but not too crowded. A small boy in a Scout’s uniform sprang to his feet to offer the sixtyish lady who had got on at the same time his seat, but she declined it, being as fit and healthy as anyone else. The journey was smooth. In six stops my guard found himself at his destination. He walked down the platform and out onto a busy street, with shoppers, office workers going to work, a group of small children heading to their nursery school in a well-ordered phalanx, holding hands in pairs. Everyone would be dressed according to their station in life, not just my guard in his uniform. I thought now his name should be Klaus, no, Kurt. The border crossing was not far away. Kurt waited at the road with other busy people before the signal let them across. The cars on the street were all white or blue, and all the same shape. He entered a neat little building of glass and steel in front of the wall. There, a group of colleagues greeted him before he offered his permit, dated today. He was allowed to walk through, his jaw jutting, his bag swinging. He had a purpose. I saw the West through his eyes as he walked to the desk where he now sat: the drug-taking, the chaos, the permitted filth and mess, the idle many, the confusing and idiosyncratic ways people dressed and presented themselves, the purposelessness. It seemed impossible. But he had a job to do.

  He and I had come to this room along different routes. I had chosen it, as if the idea of society and a way of living were two quite separate questions. His orderly and rational life, supporting a society that worked in every respect as well as existing within it, was something different. Perhaps he did have children. The state would trust a family man with responsibilities to return home each day. But perhaps they would trust Kurt to return home having seen what life in the West was like on a daily basis. But I was troubled by his wife, Brigitte, no, Gerda, still lying in bed. What was she doing? She was quite idle. She was no schoolteacher, she was not ill. She was simply lolling. Her hand ventured under her pillow. There she found a box of chocolates, half finished. She would get up in a while, and go in a cloud of red chiffon into her pink bathroom to wash and soak and spray herself with perfume. Gerda was a problem in my idea of the East German state. She obstinately lay on a purple velvet sofa in my imagination: she hung there waiting for her lover to appear, an unemployed intellectual with big shoulders called Günther. What was he doing in my DDR? Why did she have no occupation? The doorbell rang. It was her lover. In my mind she said one thing, murmuring in the hallway before she opened the door and gave herself up to unlegislated ecstasy. She said only, ‘I forgot to make sure that Kurt had a bowel movement before he left the house.’

  The guard looked up. There was another man to give a ticket and a form to. This time the ticket was a white one. The form came from a different drawer. The new applicant looked us over before plumping down on a moulded plastic chair with a sigh.

  ‘It’s always the same,’ he said in English.

  ‘Have you done this before?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been doing it every three months for the last two years,’ he said. He started to write on the form. ‘I’m doing some research in their archives. I’m a historian.’

  ‘My friend’s doing a PhD,’ Ogden said, looking up. ‘But we’re going over on a sort of holiday.’

  ‘Good luck,’ the historian said. ‘They make it as tiresome as they can. The whole process. Every time there’s a more searching interview and every time it turns out that they got the wrong end
of the stick last time. When I came last time, they began by saying, “So, Dr Clark, you are researching the history of the Australian embassy in Berlin.” I had to tell them, no, I was researching nineteenth-century Protestant missions. The Australian embassy came into it because I’d submitted a letter from them supporting my application. I think somebody just thought they had to write something to satisfy their superiors. You’re adventurous, going on holiday in the DDR. Where are you planning to go?’

  I ran through our itinerary. ‘We both wanted to see a socialist state in reality,’ I finished. ‘We’ve been supporters of socialism in the UK. But you can’t understand the full detail of it without spending some time in a socialist system that’s established itself.’

  ‘In different ways,’ Ogden put in. To my surprise he gave the impression of being somewhat embarrassed by what I had just said. ‘What’s the process? How long does this take?’

  The historian was looking amused. I suppose in retrospect what I had said was absurdly idealistic, and probably not at all what most people would say when in a bureaucratic waiting room. The officer in charge of handing out tickets had paid no obvious attention to what I had said. ‘It’s a same-day thing,’ the historian said. ‘If you’ve got all the papers they ask for you’ll be sorted out in three or four hours. Don’t be intimidated by them making you wait like this. It’s all a performance. They want you to be a bit frightened. Just act unimpressed. Good luck. When you’re in Weimar go to see Goethe’s house. It’s beautiful. And in Berlin I always have a beer at the bar at the corner of Kollwitzplatz. In Prenzlauer Berg. It’s been there since the 1920s. Top tip.’