I had no trouble at the station checkpoint, though the East German border police had new detection equipment the size of an iron lung. I was on my invincible American way down Unter den Linden in a taxi, a gaseous plastic Trabant, a make of the East German state auto company. I was thinking that I had to take things down a notch, known to security at the Palast Hotel as I imagined I was. I’d got across the border with newspapers I’d forgot I had on me on my first trip for Bags, and I offered them to the barman. He stashed them sharply, as he did the envelope of West German marks I’d carried to the men’s room in my boot.
Again, I ordered a cocktail and brazenly didn’t touch it. Jay, or J., Bags’s contact, took the architectural drawings and said something about the books that were not available in the German Democratic Republic. He said that he sent his grandmother shopping for rap records when she visited West Germany.
The Palast was tawdry in its East Bloc magnificence. Tiers of bronze or copper panels made the hotel front blind, an echo of the bronze-like mirrors that covered the unfortunate People’s Parliament building across Unter den Linden not far away, late Soviet Modernism of the 1970s, pretentious and off-target, buildings that inspired compassion for the lives that produced them. Lurking across the Spree was a prickly, blackened dome, the indestructible Baroque Revival monstrosity of the early twentieth-century Berlin Cathedral, which I’d never seen the inside of.
It was too cold to walk back to Friedrichstrasse and would soon be too late for the last train. Already J. or Jay was someone I would not see again, a contact in a network Bags was about to lose but would find easier to reconstruct than he expected. Half a million people had massed on the Alexanderplatz the day the pianist Cello most revered died, and I heard in the café that when the government resigned, dancing would be permitted at East German demonstrations.
I’d walked down Unter den Linden some weeks before, from the forced fun of the Palast enjoyed by very few, past the tall gates of the university where W.E.B. Du Bois had been a doctoral candidate during the rule of the last kaiser. In those days, I paid attention to the long arc of his alienation — black nationalism, Stalinism, Ghana, death. But once upon a time he could read Goethe and still go to bed happy every night.
The Neue Wache, that lucid Doric temple by Friedrich Schinkel, had become a shrine, a place of architectural pilgrimage. It was kept empty, except for an eternal flame marking the tomb of an unknown soldier. Usually, shifts of two handsome sentries did duty in the portico. On this night I found an army in front of Schinkel’s guardhouse, a rehearsal for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic.
The mournful band music and the parade of soldiers and sailors in the klieg lights were a country’s funeral for itself. Two older soldiers and a young one watched from the sidelines behind me. The young one had such beautiful cider eyes under his gray helmet, with such an expression of canine suspicion in them, that I had to walk back and look at him again.
East Berlin was so underlit that I could make out the Little Dipper. It suited many like me that the unreal city was surrounded by a society with an inferiority complex. Manfred said that Rosa Luxemburg would have been as nasty as any of them had she gained power. Such people were at their best in the opposition.
The old dream’s yearning had crept comfortably back into my heart. I’d not come to Berlin to be noble and gay. I wasn’t there to get down with history either. I was there to let go in the shadow of either a Teuton or a Tartar thug. My hour, was it coming? I called to it: it’s time, it’s time.
* * *
“The Wall is gone.” She flew back to her car. She’d been on the café phone with the rumor to a friend at a television station. I dropped the milk that I’d hiked to the gas station to buy, the only reason I was at the front door when the redhead Co-op member’s sister screeched to a halt and grabbed her and the butcher’s son.
It was nothing to drive fast in West Berlin, insanely, though people on the opposite corner would lecture you, the foreign pedestrian, if you crossed toward them against a red light. The redhead’s sister had to reverse twice, she was so unsure which turn led where. We met heavy traffic under Speer’s lamps in the Tiergarten. Dozens of incredulous others were leaving their automobiles. We took off.
I ran in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate. There weren’t that many people yet. Some were walking on the Wall, bathed in light from the West, but British soldiers pulled them down. We booed. I tried to listen to what one soldier said on his walkie-talkie. The soldiers formed a line in front of the Wall. Then suddenly they withdrew. Two guys were left on the Wall. One looked like a beefy worker, the other a kid. From the eastern sector came a long shower of water, then two feeble streams. The kid drew cheers from the growing crowd when he sat down and opened an umbrella. The water hit and spun his umbrella. The worker stood with his back to the East and let the water cannon drench him. The water couldn’t move him, much less knock him off, as he raised his fist to the agitated crowd.
Police, or maybe they were soldiers, idled along the sides, occasionally stepping forward to prevent someone from trying to climb up. Periodically the sweeping water pushed us back, more because it was so cold than from any force it had. People darted through puddles, chanting, “Away with the Wall,” and photographers also rushed about. The observation platforms were packed. Now I couldn’t see where the crowd behind me ended. Most eyes were fixed on the two men on the Wall, who were by now standing together, arm in arm, huddled against the water. I couldn’t tell what was going to happen. The police did not seem clear in their minds either, other than to keep calm when they intercepted some excited person.
I saw that behind the Reichstag people were being hauled up and there were no police to stop them. I ran to the edge and raised my hands. I was lifted up and set down on the Berlin Wall. It was at its thickest at the Brandenburg Gate. The surface was wide enough to lie across. More people were coming up. I walked toward the lights at the middle of the Wall, but it became so bright I couldn’t tell where I was putting my feet. The wet made me think they’d reactivate the water. The lights turned the Wall pink and the people shiny as they ran back and forth, each person seeming to talk to himself or herself as in a dream.
The way down looked long. I expected a hard fall, but guys lowered me like a sack. I saw a woman stop in front of the white crosses behind the Reichstag. She put her hands on her cheeks. On one side, the black Spree. On the other, thin trees failing to contain a three-quarter moon. There were cyclist shapes in the dirt path and the red tips of cigarettes everywhere. The S-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse glowed orange in the night, like a UFO. Across No Man’s Land, I heard chants of mass impudence.
The bullet holes in the Invalidenstrasse bridge had been filled in ages ago, but I had the time to count them. It took so long to get across and through the gates into East Berlin. People leaving West Berlin pressed against people leaving East Berlin, and on either side they passed through a gauntlet of applause. Grown men pounded on the hoods of Trabis or passed bottles up to long-coated border guards, the hated Vopos. One looked away, as if ashamed his side had lost. My dear Marcellinus, false gods cannot save a city.