Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [8]
3
Bornholmer Bridge
It takes less than two hours to get from Leipzig to Berlin but Miriam had never been there in her life. Alone in the big city, she bought herself a map at the station. ‘I wanted to have a look at the border in a few places. I thought: this cannot be for real, somewhere or other you just must be able to get over that thing.’
At the Brandenburg Gate she was amazed that she could walk right up to the Wall. She couldn’t believe the guards let her get that close. But it was too flat and too high to climb. Later she found out that the whole border paraphernalia only started behind the Wall at that spot. ‘Even if I had been able to get up there, I could only have put my head over and waved “Hello” to the eastern guards.’ She waves with both hands, and shrugs her shoulders.
By nightfall the chances were looking slim. ‘I hadn’t found any holes in it,’ Miriam says. She was cold and unhappy. She sat in the suburban train on her way to Alexanderplatz station to catch the regional line home. It was dark and she was going back to prison. The train sluiced between buildings, high up on its stilts. Buildings on both sides, flat concrete render facades with rectangular windows, five storeys high. Some lit, some dark, some with plants, some without. Then the vista changed. It took Miriam a moment to notice it in the dark, but suddenly she was going past high wire-mesh fencing.
‘I thought: if I am travelling along here, and there’s this big wire fence right next to me, then West Berlin would have to be just over there on the other side.’ She got off the train, crossed the platform and caught another train back. It was as she had thought: a tall wire fence. She got off again and went back, this time getting out at Bornholmer Bridge station.
Later, I looked up the Bornholmer Bridge on a street map. I had heard of it, and thought it might have been one of the places East and West Germany used to exchange each other’s spies. Now, I see nothing but this bridge each time I open a street map. It is like once you notice someone has a cast in his eye, that’s all you can see in his face.
A western train line and an eastern train line met rarely in divided Germany. At Bornholmer Bridge the western train line still swoops down from the northwest to the southwest, and the eastern one up from the southeast to the northeast. The shapes they make on the map are like figures in profile doing a Maori nose-kiss.
At Bornholmer Bridge the border ran, in theory, along the space between the tracks. In other places in Berlin the border, and with it the Wall, cut a strange wound through the city. The Wall went through houses, along streets, along waterways, and sliced underground train lines to pieces. Here, instead of cutting the train line, the East Germans built most of the Wall’s fortifications in front of the train line on the eastern side, letting the eastern trains run through to the furthest wall at the end of the death strip.
‘I had a look at the lie of the land and decided: not too bad.’ Miriam could see the border installation, the cacophony of wire and cement, asphalt and sand. In front of where it began was a hectare or so of fenced-in garden plots, each with its own little shed. These handkerchief gardens are a traditional German solution to apartment dwellers’ yearning for a tool shed and a vegetable garden. They make a patchwork of green in odd corners of urban land, along train lines or canals or, as here, in the lee of the Wall.
Miriam climbed through and over the fences separating the gardens, trying to get closer to the Wall. ‘It was dark and I was lucky—later I learned that they usually patrolled the gardens as well.’ She got as far as she could go but not to the Wall, because there was this ‘great fat hedge’ growing in front of it. She rummaged around in someone’s tool shed for a ladder, and