R.H.I. Read online

  The crowd began gathering early. Well before the day’s heat could bring the haze out of the city’s surfaces and let it hang in the air, the oval building site of Strausberger Platz was too full. The site expanded to take in other sites; the crowd spilled up and to the east, and reached also along the messy open space to the west, a shifting mess of people that moved itself in knots and lines: groups of comrades who walked side by side; short queues that fed in and out, trailing those who took their lead from others; tight circles where information and anger were focused, before someone would break away to run a few paces and meet others. No one could imagine the place from above, the way H had become accustomed—in its plans, its lines drawn. Instead a feeling of being in amongst things took over, so that Strausberger Platz, last night a symbol for what was to come the next day, ceased to exist for them. They were no longer meeting anywhere, not even at a symbolic place, but had become their own place. H, at home, felt it too, as if the city were lifting up from the ground—or rather, as if its people were lifting, leaving his buildings abandoned. The impatience was about food shortages and work, and not about architecture. Each person knew the size of the crowd, without being able to name even an approximate number.

  The decision to bring in troops and tanks had already been taken in Moscow the previous day, and in the late morning they moved into parts of the city at walking pace. The first shots were fired; the rocks used for paving the streets became weapons—. In the evening, when the day’s events were still echoing and lying over the city in layers penetrated by an innocently setting sun, a curfew was announced. Those who missed it, even those, according to one account, who were mere minutes from their front doors, were taken away in darkened vans to an anonymous building, then, early the next day, taken further off, so that some thought they were being deported to the Soviet Union. In the camp where they found themselves with increasing numbers of others, they were separated by gender and repeatedly questioned. The Soviet authorities were unapologetically looking for agitators, those paid or inspired by the West to raise the crowd—a minority. The soldiers were jumpy, and shouted at the mass of people kept within a large warehouse to keep quiet; at times shots were fired at random into them. When they were released some days later, each was given compensation in the form of money.

  Some time in the midst of all this, there was a ring at the door. Isi invited in a small group of men and women, many of them familiar from the Free German Youth brigade who met at the apartment from time to time. Their spokesperson was a young man. Also among them was Anita R. She did not meet H’s eye or acknowledge their friendship. H told them to wait for a moment. It was a relief to have access to a working telephone! He managed to raise Brecht, who was also at home.

  Brecht said, ‘Wait, I’ll come.’

  The workers passively received the news that the writer would be joining them. In the meantime, Isi and Marga arranged coffee. The spokesperson couldn’t keep himself to pleasantries. He said, ‘I’m in an impossible situation. I have a family, and friends here!’

  They told him to wait. H said, ‘Brecht will want to hear this.’

  H, for his part, also did not acknowledge Anita R. Her presence here was wrong in a way he could not understand. She was a worker; she had, no doubt, taken part in the protests; and she clearly knew some of the others—why should she not be here? What was wrong was that? With her silent stance, she said, ‘Why should I not be here? I am a worker. I took part in the protests. I know some of the others.’

  With his own silence, H said, ‘But with you, there is some other negotiation.’

  Soon enough Brecht arrived, and nodded and shook hands with each of the visitors in turn. He looked at them seriously as they took their seats, and said, ‘I want to hear your stories.’ Brecht’s polite fussing somehow calmed them, although he now sat silently, cross-legged, having little part in the conversation.

  The young man said, ‘I’m in an impossible situation! I’m worried I will have to go to the West.’

  H said, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I think I speak for everyone—everyone here did some of the same things.’

  H did not say, ‘Even you, Anita?’

  Anita did not say, ‘Yes.’

  H said, ‘What did you do?’

  The young man said, ‘I overturned a car. I mean, not on my own—I took part in it, helped to tip it up onto its roof. The tanks were there.’

  H nodded; in fact, Brecht, H and Isi all nodded, as if they were sitting in silent judgement.

  H did not say, ‘And you?’

  Anita did not say, ‘Yes, that kind of thing too.’

  H did not say, ‘Is this what you wanted me to help you with?’

  Anita did not say, ‘I didn’t plan any of this. I don’t know.’

  The young man said, ‘I didn’t plan any of this. None of us did. It was like we were in a haze, like we’d lost control over our actions. We were angry about the work quotas. They were just too high.’

  H did not say, ‘This was always going to be hard work, for everyone—building a city.’

  ‘Actually,’ said the young man, ‘I don’t have anything in particular against the government. I just don’t want to go to prison. I have a wife and children. I don’t want to lose them, or lose my friends. Do I have to leave?’

  ‘No, no,’ H said. ‘I will do my best to help you if there are any difficulties. I think you will be fine. This is your country, and the government is your government. I will help.’ Why had he said it twice? ‘I will explain your situation—the political situation you all found, find yourself in. There’s a background, a set of difficulties, I know … I will try to understand it and explain it on your behalf.’

  Brecht left with the delegation, still not having said a word more. He telephoned the following day and said, ‘Thank you for that experience.’ He said, ‘I have regained my faith in the working class. I wrote a poem about it—the first poem I have written for months.’

  H had, again, promised his assistance. What had his promise to do with Anita R’s presence in the room? He would try, he said, I wrote, to understand the situation of the protesting workers, but with Anita R there was a limit to understanding, signified (though again, of course, H did not know this) by the formula K/R. But now again K/R had spilled over, out from the figure of Anita R herself, had made its presence felt in the room, and as the workers had left and gone back out to their homes, back to their apartments in the city, it also seemed as if it infected the wider city. K/R was the formula for an impossibility, for a debt that could not be paid, a debt to communism and a debt to the city, which, after all, promised to do so much for us. We could not, according to the formula of K/R, ever repay the city enough—it would keep asking and asking us to be part of it, and no matter how much we believed, we could not quite be what it asked of us. Each new request exhausted us; each new demand; even each promise the city made to us only made us more aware of a rift between us and the city, between K and R. What on Earth can we mean by that? The city shone above us, and we wanted it; we still want it.

  Ein Stadtplan. Anita R herself, which is to say K herself, was now, thanks to the protests, in a dangerous situation. She should, as Anita R, have kept out of trouble. She wondered what Anita, the first Anita, her old friend, now forgotten, what Anita would have done in the face of the protests. It was a meaningless thought. Anita had disappeared without trace, to become nothing but a name. She had become a shell, a mask, inside which K hid, making constant efforts to become that mask. Where was the soldier’s body? There must be places where bodies were disposed of, places that existed as little as K now existed. K, it might be said, was buried next to the soldier’s wounded body. While Anita R continued to work on the building site at Strausberger Platz, seeing the buildings rise up around her, their surfaces seemed to have something of the same masklike quality of her own exterior. They were H’s own mask, one that he (as she knew from the newspaper accounts of his transformation) had also struggled
to become. And, yes, he lived in one—two, joined—of his own apartments. But she knew the buildings also for their materials. Eventually, they began to make the buildings with prefabricated concrete and steel panels; the structures could be erected quickly, the pieces moved into place using heavy machinery. She used her hands less. Stalin, before his death, had continued to propose the compromise of a united Germany, though his proposals were rejected by the West. After his death, in the Soviet Union, the situation was unclear—who would rule? The story, that is, was suspended. It was difficult to keep my thoughts focused on a suspended story, I wrote. I took increasingly to walking around the city, trying again to understand it simply by observing its buildings. I remembered the first time I had visited the city, when I was very young, staying in a tent in the city’s campground far to the West, near the Reuter B power station. There was, I remembered, I wrote, a short walk from the end of the S-Bahn line to the campground, which passed near the cooling tower of the power station. There was an industrial noise audible as we walked past the cooling tower, though I suspect now that the noise did not come from the tower itself. That sight is actually the strongest impression I have of Berlin from that first visit. It was the strongest impression possible for an antipodean traveller, since it seemed to represent, behind its white curved surface with a chequered band around its mid-height, unknown processes, large processes, processes that, coming as I did from the very other end of the earth, I had no way of understanding, and no right to try. A great cloud rose from the top of the tower; its inside was a circulating chaos of superheated steam and water vapour, an effort to control the waste heat, I wrote, from the process of burning brown coal mined in the large open cast mines found near the city. The power station was the source of the West’s power, before the whole of Germany became the West or former-West. It kept that other city alive. Postdamer Platz on that first visit was, I remembered, a messy, muddy field. I didn’t venture as far east then as Friedrichshain or Strausberger Platz. But what could be understood from observing buildings? I tried to get the measure of the place. I had spent so much time ‘with’ H, sometimes at our apartment, sometimes at the Staatsbibliothek, that I really just had to forget about him for a while.

  While I walked I was joined, one by one, by four people: a man and three women. The man was wearing a uniform. One of the women was a young writer; one was an older, German woman; and one was an immigrant. Together we conducted a kind of tour of the city, one during which I remained silent. They were all concerned to show me the city, ‘their’ city. We looked at the city from outside, from above—outsiders’ views, all of them.

  The man in uniform said, ‘See there? That is where the wall ran. It ran around the western part of the city, but seen from above’—we saw it now from above—‘it wasn’t circular; instead, its edge was jagged, and it turned sharp corners often. Along its upper edge—after the wall was heightened and strengthened—it was round in cross-section, as if a pipeline ran along it, to make it difficult to climb. There was an empty wasteland on the outer edge, punctuated by watchtowers. There were different checkpoints for different purposes. Come along here: there were checkpoints here for West Berlin citizens only, and others where citizens from elsewhere in West Germany could cross over. The entry points on the western side were for transit only. Here, at Friedrichstrasse, was the checkpoint for foreigners and diplomats. There is no sign now of the checkpoints; some of the wall is left, like here. The steel reinforcing can be seen—the concrete has been chipped away to reveal it, like bones. Here, the graffiti that cover so much of the city are absent—just on this stretch of wall. It will be pulled down or made into a museum. The people who make the graffiti know this, and don’t bother themselves with claiming it. Look: all the buildings that are close on this side are new.’

  The young writer said, ‘Everyone knows this. I’ve walked, as far as I can, the whole length of the wall.’

  The German woman said, ‘I have also walked it.’

  The man in uniform said, ‘Look: the place where they’ve set up an outdoor café is an empty bomb site. Behind it is a wall that is falling down, and behind that another building—the windows you can see on that one would once have looked onto an enclosed courtyard. Follow the children. They’re going to one of the playgrounds. Look!’ Three young children, aged between seven and ten, had left the front door of a house, and chased each other along the footpath. There were no cars moving, though plenty were parked at an angle on the road. The children were wrapped up against the cold, with hats and scarves. Then, they turned from the road to the playground: swings and a seesaw, but more, to one side, a large wooden boat painted red that they could climb into. Around the boat, trees gave shelter and the grass was tainted white, in the shade, with frost. The blank sides of buildings bounded either side of the playground, windowless and dark like silhouette outlines of themselves. From the ship came the sound of the two younger ones, a sideways sound, echoing off the walls, while the older child stood with her hands in her pockets. The man in uniform said, ‘The playground is in another empty bomb site. There seem to be more of these empty spaces in the east. In the west, they are filled in with new buildings.’

  The woman who had spoken said, ‘I lived near here.’

  The other woman said, ‘When I first arrived from Yugoslavia, I was in a new building in the West. There were a lot of us there together. It wasn’t one built in a bomb site, but one surrounded by grass. The empty space didn’t help—it would have been better to be surrounded by buildings.’

  The man said, ‘Some whole neighbourhoods were destroyed by bombs. If you look at photographs there is literally nothing but rubble. I’ve seen rubble and destruction, but I can’t imagine being here at that time. The ground would shift under your feet. Nothing would be solid.’

  The German woman said, ‘We built it up again! I was here! We played in the rubble, in buildings that were falling down until finally they demolished the remains. Once, a girlfriend and I snuck into the old City Palace, into the remains of it. There were magnificent archways that seemed like they might fall on us. It was a huge shell that leant over us, and we climbed over the rubble to get inside. I was scared. That’s what I remember anyway.’

  The writer said, ‘I live near here now. I walk around the corner, then up this street and past the children’s playground, turn the corner again, and I’m at my office. I’ve had the office for two years, and the apartment I share with my boyfriend for four years. Who can say I don’t belong in this city?’

  The German woman said, ‘I’ve been here for sixty-eight years—since I was born. But who could say you don’t belong here? Not me!’

  The writer said, ‘Look: there’s my friend Hendryk. He’s from Rotterdam, and shares my office with me. He must be coming out for lunch.’

  The German woman said, ‘It’s always hard when somewhere changes so much. I was born just before the war, so everything was change, right then when I was born.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘We’re sisters, you and I.’

  The German woman said, ‘Who are you?’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘Your sister. I came here because I had nothing else. I managed to stay, though so many of my friends had to move on.’

  The writer said, ‘And there’s my friend Anna. She’s with her friend Til. Along here, near where my boyfriend and I lived before we moved to our current place, there’s a park with table-tennis tables, and a café that’s been there ever since we arrived. This is our city!’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘I feel so out of place here—but it’s also my city. Everyone has come here recently. It’s no one’s city.’

  The German woman said, ‘I’ve been here all my life.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘I know, sister.’

  The man said, ‘Bombs destroyed around a quarter of the buildings in the city, either totally or badly enough so that they needed to be pulled down. When they finally got here they came and unleashed such a—’


  The German woman said, ‘I know.’

  The writer said, ‘But when I write about Berlin, I write about everyone being too late. Everyone was too late for something: to see the city in its classical splendour; to see the war; to see the wall go up; to see the wall come down. Who can say they’ve witnessed it all? Everyone has come here too late. There is always someone who claims superiority by having been here longer. People in Berlin compete based on the length of time they’ve spent here. Who is the real citizen? No one.’