WHY WE DON’T TALK ABOUT FREYA ANYMORE
There is something fearful in bearing such a relation to a creature so imperfectly known…
In the shining cobblestoned darkness of Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse, black crowds stood before the bright and empty shop windows. And Lina was lost among them. Lina had come in memory of her sister Freya, who’d been sacrificed to the firestorm. And Lina was lost everywhere! Once upon a time, the dome, tower and spire of the Frauenkirche rose above Dresden’s ancient narrow streets, which were now far more fictional than they had ever been in Hoffmann’s fairytale of the Golden Pot. Come to think of it, that strangely flat ornateness of so many edifices in prewar Dresden could have been theatrical backdrops. The play was called “Lina and Freya.” The Dresden in the old books never existed except in books, an objective fact, which implies that the ruins in broken waves of brick and stone from that night and morning when all Dresden got shattered open like a pomegranate whose seeds have been plucked from their catacombs weren’t actually there. Dresden is Europe Central, the walled kingdom in the middle of the past! Every day here begins once upon a time. But Barbarossa has withdrawn into his mountain cave to dream new cruel dreams; he’s lost to us; he never existed. Just as depressing truths from Stalingrad must be considered Russian propaganda (a mother kneeling over a frozen body, a long, long winding column of muffled, staggering figures vanishing into the fog), so the burning of Dresden was itself nothing more than a nightmare: Wake from it and see our homeland’s blond German boys in little uniforms, reaping the harvest with hand-forged scythes! This logic also allows me to say that neither Lina nor Freya ever existed except as acronymic reifications of the black telephone’s tentacles. What were they, but literary characters?
But Lina was lost. Once this had been a different street, with a different name. Now it was Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse with its exposed pipes shading the snow.
When she crossed into Berlin-Ost at the end of that last year before the Wall, she had been somehow sure that a person would be waiting for her, perhaps one of her parents; she remembered them coming to meet her when she was a child; she expected someone, anyone. Well, wasn’t that life? There’s never any help, her father always used to say.
Frankly, she had been a little afraid to go. She’d heard what we all had about the other Germany. But she had to respect Freya’s memory.
It was like returning ten years to enter this new East Germany. Here, of course, the economic miracle had never occurred. Everyone looked hungry and shabby to her.
From Berlin-Ost she took the train back into our German heartland—dark trees above blonde grass, and clouds over all—where it seemed as if another five years undid themselves! Scorched castles, boarded-up apartments, empty towns. All these stage sets had been shunted from eastward by the machinery of politics, so that the dying fairytale could play itself out to other captive audiences. They passed a poster which no one had troubled to remove: LEARNING FROM THE SOVIET UNION MEANS LEARNING FROM VICTORY! Ivy had grown across it. Which hero would wake Sleeping Beauty?
At Bahnhof-Dresden her family was not waiting at the platform; how could Lina have predicted when she would arrive? She disembarked with her one suitcase and stood in the cold, dirty station. Here was where she’d once kissed that lieutenant whose name she no longer remembered; he’d spoken in the accents of a Silesian. Where must he be now? East or underground.
The love of Lina’s life had been a Russian translator named Elena Konstantinovskaya, for whom she had drawn up her white, white knees; she had never done anything like that before with a woman, and it was never the same afterward, not the way it had been with Elena.
It was the very last year for Weimar Berlin: Red-lipped Hansis in long red dresses kept licking their swizzlesticks at Lina. She won the pretty-knee contest at that well-known venue on Schwerinstrasse 13. All the while she had been longing for Elena. At the Verona-Lounge she learned to dance tangos with ripe-breasted Gougnettes who wore men’s hats. Freya would have been scandalized. I’ve seen her wear a Titus-Kopf, for whose snaky coils she paid the hairdresser two days’ wages. Gypsy-Lotte at the Topkeller, who was always kind to her, even on Friday nights, fixed her up with Christa, Grete, and then, despairingly, with Red Minna, but Lina never felt, as she had with Elena, that her white thighs were shining.
You never inspect yourself in the mirror, said Lotte. That’s a giveaway. Women who don’t love looking at themselves don’t love other women. You’re not actually one of us.
Lina replied: It’s just that whenever I look I’m disappointed.
Doubtless brevity and novelty had contributed substantially to the perfection of Lina’s experience, which seemed in retrospect to have lasted longer than one of Leningrad’s white nights. She remembered lying on her side gazing down at her lover, until dawn set Elena’s throat whitely aglow; now Lina could see her pulse, which was healthy and rapid like someone hurrying away from her. Elena’s rich red lips were parted and her cigarette-breath soughed almost inaudibly in and out. When she began to wake, Lina rolled away to save Elena from being haunted by her needy eyes. (This was the curse of Elena’s life, that so many people loved her so deeply that she must fail them all.)
What happened to you in Leningrad? Freya asked over and over.
That had been the beginning of the coldness between them.
Then what? A government of national recovery.
After Stalingrad, Lina had been mobilized to insert the fuses into eighty-eight-caliber shells. In 1945 she found herself mobilized again, this time by the Amis, who made us walk the hot stinking meadows where concentration camp corpses had been laid out: stinking, festering matchstick legs, groins prudishly covered by blankets. How could this have gone on? We’d never heard anything about it except a few whispers. The woman in front of her vomited. As for Lina, she looked straight ahead, disgusted but not overwhelmed; for by the time the war ended we’d all seen judgments of one kind or another.
Next came the Cold War. We all got mobilized again.
Lina’s eyes were still brown but her hair was grey.
Do you remember the line of scurrying archaic figures on the Georgentor? They were following a skeleton, as in Käthe Kollwitz’s drawings. And now their skeleton had led them into nothingness. They were gone in the fire.
Her family were all at home. She hadn’t seen them since ’42. She burst into tears at the sight of their starved submissive faces.
They sat around a white-draped oval table, drinking tea and wine for Lina’s birthday; Freya’s photograph was on the wall, and a porcelain angel simpered down upon them all in sanitized nudity.
Her father, who was now very, very old, tried to explain to her how it had all happened: We tried to keep them away with a barrage from our eighty-eights, but there were too many planes, flying too fast and too high.
Fortunately, that was dead history. The Anglo-American criminals exercised no jurisdiction over our zone. Dresden had come to know the comforting presence of the Red Army soldier.
She had brought chocolate and coffee. Her mother cried.