Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [111]
If you’re ever through San Fran, please let me know.
Julia :)
The apartment is not much changed. Such a rock-bottom flat, it would have been hard to denude it further. In fact, it is the additions that are most noticeable. There is a line of postcards pinned up on the wall and over the ceiling of the living room. They suggest travel, but are souvenirs only of pub crawls through the city—they are the free ones with advertising on them. In the kitchen there is a jar of scrawny but cheery dried lavender. And in the bedroom a large drawing of a mushroom in magic marker has appeared on the wall. The mushroom has two cross-hatched windows on its cap for eyes, and a door in the stem. It also has a wide smile on its face (the door is a big tooth), because this mushroom head is also a penis, and it is coming all up the bedroom wall.
The first morning I get up and take my coffee across the road to the park. It’s very early but light already, an exquisite day. The sky is blue-white, the air still and new and the streets are hushed. The park is a sweeping curve of green up to the café, shuttered over like eyelids. At the bottom lies the pond, which I knew before as a black and dead thing. Now, waterlilies float in it, opening up to touch the sun. Somewhere near, a small band of frogs ushers in the day.
I sit on one of the benches and look up at the statue of Heine. I never spent time here before; the seats seemed always to be occupied. Instead of a poet’s hands, the East German sculptor has given Heine big workman’s paddles. The quote reads:
We don’t catch hold of an idea, rather the idea catches hold of us and enslaves us and whips us into the arena so that we, forced to be gladiators, fight for it.
Heine, the free-thinking poet, would be turning in his grave to see the sort of enslaving and forcing and fighting that has gone on here, under his cold black nose and pigeon-shit shoulders.
Shapes catch my eye behind the statue. Two men are shuffling in, one from up the hill and one from the corner below, in suits and slippers with tins of beer in their pockets. Another three appear and take their places on the benches. A couple of them carry cloth shopping bags full of cans; one is wearing a medal on a ribbon around his neck like a lord mayor. Once everyone is settled (am I in someone’s place?—they are leaving a whole bench for me) there are polite greetings and handshakes all round, and nods to me. It is as if we were in someone’s living room.
One old fellow kneels on his bench to face over the park. He takes out two slices of white bread and breaks them, with shaky hands, into even-sized pieces. Instead of throwing them, he lays out a pattern in crumbs on the concrete rampart behind the seat, each piece equidistant from the others. Some kind of madness, some kind of generosity.
A man jogs past in yellow shorts and a bandana. The drunks greet him in chorus. ‘Morgen!’
‘Morgen!’ he puffs back.
These park men are the gatekeepers here, suited and tracksuited sphinxes.
Sparrows and pigeons start to fly in for the bread and suddenly I understand my companion’s ceremonial care. We are now the central focus of the park: nature comes to us in small-winged genuflections at this altar of bread and beer.
A latecomer walks up to the group in black training pants. His legs are stilts inside the synthetic material. He’s slightly younger than the others, his hair dark and slicked back. He carries a sports bag full of beer.
‘Harry! Mate! Long time no see,’ says the man with the medal. The medal rests on his bare belly. He is wearing a suitcoat with no shirt and red braces over his skin to hold his pants up.
‘I been away.’
‘Where you been?’
‘On holiday.’
‘You been on holiday? Mensch! I need a holiday. Where d’you go?’
‘Mexico.’
I feel a laugh forming, but the others are nodding solemnly.
‘What you been doing over there then?’
‘Huntin’.’
‘Ahha,’ the lord mayor nods. ‘Good huntin’ in Mexico?’
‘The best.’
‘What d’you hunt then, in Mexico?’
‘Elephants.’
No-one bats an eye. ‘Any luck?’
‘Naah…’ Harry shakes his head, sits down