Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [112]
The man with the medal turns to me and raises his can. ‘Cheers,’ he says.
‘Cheers.’ I lift my mug.
‘Healthier than beer,’ he grins. He is missing two front teeth.
‘But not as much fun.’ I smile back.
He takes this as an invitation and comes to sit on my bench. ‘You’re not from around here,’ he says, reaching into his pocket for a tin of tobacco.
‘No.’
‘You from Cologne?’
‘No. I’m—’
‘Lemme guess. Hamburg?’
‘No, I’m from Australia.’
‘Oh,’ he says. He leans in to me and puts a large hand with curved brown fingernails on my knee. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he breathes, ‘I too have impure blood.’
I’m smiling, astonished. ‘How’s that?’
‘My mother was a Pole.’
‘Oh.’
He starts rolling a cigarette. His grey hair is brylcreemed into a neat duck’s tail. His moustache is stained brown where he sucks the cigarette. When he puts it in his mouth he can keep talking hands-free, the cigarette clinging mysteriously to his bottom lip.
‘You like this park?’ he asks.
‘Yes, very much.’
‘This park is good, but you should come mushrooming with us sometime. That’s the best.’
‘Really? Where do you go?’
‘We all get on the train, me and some of my friends there.’ He gestures to the others who have been watching us intently, but now turn quickly back to their business. ‘We go out to the end of the line with our baskets and gather mushrooms. It’s fantastic!’
I’m wondering whether he’s having me on, painting a picture of train-riding drunks springing sprightly through the forests with their baskets and beer, plucking dainty mushrooms as they go, waving at the elephants. But he’s not.
‘We get,’ and he lists the species, ‘Steinpilze, Pfifferlinge, Maron, Bergenpilze, Butterpilze, Sandpilze—they are yellow underneath and spongy. Rotkappe—they look like Fliegenpilze but aren’t, and—’, something I don’t quite catch, ‘but you mustn’t take them, because those you can only eat once!’ He laughs, throwing his head back so I see an expanse of gum and ridged palate like an underwater thing. ‘We get four kilos in each basket, and we come home and cook them up with a little butter—superb!’ He waves a forefinger in front of me. ‘You know,’ he says, bringing the finger to his chest, ‘when it comes to mushrooms, in that field I am a professor!’
Professor Mushroom’s medal wobbles a little, blinking in the light on his stomach. A mumbled chorus of approval comes from the other benches; his friends raise their cans to him. I’m glad to be here. It strikes me as absurd to have never spoken with these men before who have been, after all, my neighbours.
He continues with some advice. ‘You’ve got to get outdoors,’ he says. ‘You know, television is not good for the eyes. Not healthy.’ I wonder if he was somehow watching over me that winter, seeing the flickering black and white at my window. Maybe these men, stationed in parks and on street corners, at tramstops and in the underground, are the ones who see everything now. A woman walks past on her way to the lights, and he lifts his hand in greeting, or to let her pass.
‘Back in the GDR I was a tailor. Now that’s not good for the eyes either. I wanted to be an actor or a cook, but it didn’t happen.’ I think he has become both, with this performance and his sautéed mushrooms. ‘Until 1990 I was in the voluntary fire brigade, but then it all went to hell in a handcart. This Kapitalismus, you can’t imagine the sort of shit it’s building.’ He sniffs and spits onto the ground. Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a comb. ‘It was so much better before. I’m in the same flat—then it cost me 450 marks a month, and now it’s 804! So what if we didn’t have bananas and mandarins! It doesn’t take a banana to turn me on!’ He runs the comb carefully through his coiffure. ‘I used to be able to get five kilos of potatoes for next to nothing, beer was fifty pfennig a can and now what?