They flew me back to East Berlin; I have always enjoyed airplanes. A stenographer kept me company at my interrogation. Perhaps he liked me for myself. He “played the piano” on a captured “Erika” typewriter. Next they brought me before the Red Guillotine, who condemned me to death, then gave me a fair trial according to all principles of socialist legality. A golden bust of Wilhelm Pieck looked on in sternly loving solicitude. Again I admitted everything. Infected by American gangsterism, I’d conspired to weaken their defensive preparedness. Worse yet, I’d continued to dream of a so-called “German way to socialism.” I’d forgotten the greatest ally and friend of the German working class, the Soviet Union. Indeed, I’d thought to rob the Soviet Union of my beautiful Elena Konstantinovskaya. Finally, I reminded the court that my class had already fulfilled its historical mission and no longer deserved to exist. My defense attorney proudly embraced me.
When they shot me, I wasn’t worried; I knew that it wouldn’t do me any more harm than I had done Shostakovich. What it resembled was getting whirled down the drain of a stained old sink in a communal apartment; I could feel myself getting sucked downward, speeding round and round ever more rapidly until suddenly I was in the leaden pipe which communicated secretly with the West.
I came out, none the worse for wear, and it was night. To die in the East is to live in the West.
Now I’d done it! Their black telephones began to toll. My confession had revealed to them the danger in which they stood. Shostakovich was their voice, and Elena their soul. If we could steal her, then we’d have a soul, and they’d have none. I’d now been rendered harmless, by love if not by Nackenschuss, but what if GREINER or NEY got through?
They blockaded Berlin. That was Stage One. As soon as they could, they’d reinforce the Iron Curtain. For now, they’d starve us out of Berlin-West. This was precisely what the sleepwalker always used to worry about.
The dreamers who held hands and ran westward through Dreamland’s forests every night, trying to get away from the Red Guillotine and come to us, the Iron Curtain already stopped them. Do you remember the last days of Operation Citadel, when we were too weak to break through at Prokhorovka? This was a continuation of that operation; no war ever ends. The lucky ones were arrested in the Restricted Area; they never even reached the Protected Zone.
There remained certain games, ploys, possibilities, as exemplified by Kurt Strübund’s maneuver with the leather-bound documents of an erotic club called the Confederation Diplomatique; he smuggled a hundred and eighty East Germans across; the People’s Police believed them to be diplomatic passports! But the Iron Curtain, which was as dark grey as the soil of Poltava, jigjagged west across Prinzenstrasse to Checkpoint Charlie, then north along the edge of the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate, bisecting Unter den Linden, grazing the ruined Reichstag, continuing up to Invalidenstrasse and Chausseestrasse, then east past Brunnenstrasse before it whipped north again, enclosing, containing or sealing off sections not all of which any one individual could see (thanks to ideological differences, you know); and they now lowered the Curtain to the very ground, screwed its hem into the ground, then added long bolts! They meant to take us all to the police station, lock us away, and let us sleep off reality forever.
Fortunately for the Free World, in Tempelhof Field we’d dreamed up a great ring of hangars and terminals around the circular runway: Tempelhof Airport, with the pair of facing lions in the shadow of the two facing towers! Much of this edifice existed only in the model of the architect Sagebiel, but at least the eagle on the passenger terminal’s roof had established itself on earth; I remember seeing Russian soldiers hoist their flag up there in ’45; despite their best efforts, our eagle dwarfed them. As for the unfinished bits, no matter; we could always dream them into solidity.
Two Red Army men in forage caps and long greatcoats were clearing mines with circle-headed wands; they wore rifles at their backs, rubble before and around them. What were they really afraid of? Maybe some explosion would wake up the East, and then summer light would rush in! God knows. As it turned out, they were readying the ground for the Wall. It wouldn’t be long before the day when reliable Soviet soldiers began unrolling the very first ring of barbed wire, flush up against their side of the sign which said BRITISH SECTOR.
And what about me?
By rights I should have been relegated to the worst list of all, but the pale man in dark glasses was sentimental, I think because I’d told him that I’d once floated past a certain long line of trees in Dreamland where his father’s house used to stand; needless to say, I’d never been there, but he believed me. Operation ELENKA had always been a long shot; the Luftwaffe blueprints had been recovered to the satisfaction of the Amis, and countering the Berlin blockade was now Priority Apple. Moreover, precisely because I didn’t know who I really was, I had a way with dream-creatures. GRAENER, GREINER; HAVEMANN and PFITZNER all tried to do what I eventually did; none could withdraw the sword from the stone! For my own part, upon receiving my authorization from the highest levels of the Gehlen Organization, I clambered up to the roof of Tempelhof and struck the stone eagle with a stick. Away it flew, screaming!
Roger, Wilco, A-OK! Our airlift idylls began.
Here came the Rosinenbombers, bearing powdered milk, butter and chocolate from our former enemies, the Anglo-American Jewish plutocrats; today it was clear that our differences had been mistaken, and we all should have united against the Slavs back before Stalingrad fell.
Walls of flourbags, milkbags and sandbags rose in the warehouses! Then we really had to admit that the Amis were good.
Berliners queued up for their turn at the barrel of American milk. Smiling, skinny old men who remembered quite well how to shout Heil Hitler! wrapped themselves up in all their clothes, sat on rubble and drank bowls of American soup. One-legged black marketeers offering butter by a ruined wall looked up, while around the perimeter of Tempelhof our Amis kept rolling slowly forward, riding atop their open tanks; they were ready to beat off any monsters who might come sneaking towards us from beneath the Iron Curtain.
Another plane came through Dreamland, keeping our island vigilantly alive! (From the air, Berlin was an immense, intricately ridge-patterned butter-biscuit, whose inviting insets and arcs seemed to be made of hard white sugar; in fact it was all concrete.) More sweets flew to Tempelhof! Children ran to the summit of a hill of broken bricks, waving and waving to the American gods of chocolate.
More body-shaped bags of powdered foodstuffs descended from the bellies of those C-54s, which landed at Tempelhof every ninety seconds. It was like a dream.
We saved the black-aproned fishwives of the Markt-Halle; we allowed currency reforms to continue to incubate beneath the Reichsbank’s long square coast. We rescued the Kroll Opera House, where once upon a time the Enabling Act transformed our sleepwalker into absolute dictator. We preserved Tempelhof itself, where Käthe Kollwitz once took her son Peter to see the landing of the Wright Brothers’ “White Flame,” and the sleepwalker declared war on unemployment.