Oh, you brought a friend!” Lena’s mother exclaimed happily. “Oh that’s wonderful! Just… wonderful!”
“Mother, this is Vivika.”
“Oh, Vivika is it? Oh, how wonderful… what a beautiful name! Just a wonderful name!”
“It’s an… um, pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Schindler,” Vivika smiled, awkwardly.
“Oh, the pleasure is all mine, of course!” she exclaimed, with wide eyes and a wider smile. “Just a pleasure! A wonderful pleasure! Have you two eaten? Why don’t you let me fix you some food? Or… or I could straighten up the apartment for you. Everything should be clean for our guests!”
She attempted to struggle her way out of the bed, still holding the knitting needles and kerchief in her hands. Awkwardly, Lena attempted to bar her path while assuaging her with various protests of, “No Mom,” and “We’re fine, Mom,”. The frail woman continued unabated, however.
“Oh, it’s no trouble! No trouble at all… I was just about to fix myself some food anyway! Really, I would love to!”
“Mother… Mother!” Lena exclaimed as gently as her annoyance would allow. “It’s fine… Vivika and I just ate. Really, we’re fine!”
“Oh, nonsense! You two look like you could use another meal! I’ll whip something up right now! It’ll be perfect, don’t you worry!”
The poor woman struggled so hard to lift herself while still holding on to her knitting needles, Lena was afraid she would break something. Instead, in her haste to get up and fix the two another dinner, Lena’s mother managed to stab herself in one of her hands with a needle and began howling. Well, this simply wouldn’t do.
“Oh, Mother! You’ve cut yourself!” Lena cried out in alarm as blood began to flow freely from the hole in her mother’s hand.
“No, it’s fine! I’m just fine… really!” she exclaimed as she roughly tried to wrap a bedsheet around her injured hand. “It’s so great to see you two! I’m just… I’m going to sit here and knit! Really… you two… it’s so nice to see you!”
“Ma’am,” Vivika interjected. “Let us wrap that in a bandage.”
“No, don’t you worry!!” she exclaimed, wide-eyed. “It’s just fine! Really! So wonderful to meet you!”
“Ma’am…” Vivika attempted again.
“NO!” Lena’s mother screamed, “I’m fine. Really. Wonderful. Perfect, even. You two… so wonderful! Just leave me to my knitting. Please! Just leave me!”
“Mother…”
“No. Go!” she insisted, wide-eyed, “Go, go, go, go. Just go. You’ve been wonderful. Go!”
As the two stepped out of the room and shut the door, both managed a side-long glance at each other. This was that other look that young people give each other after meeting parents. Yet Vivika seemed just a tad more impressed than she might have been with someone else’s mother, perhaps. She remained silent of course; yet the thoughts were written all over her face in the colors of embarrassment and the tightness of concern. As they walked away, Lena could hear the muffled sounds of her mother shouting, “I didn’t say anything! Like I promised! I… I don’t know anything!”
As the two walked into Lena’s bedroom, both seemed to breathe a sigh of relief from the awkwardness. The room was just as Lena always remembered—bed, dresser, piles of mismatched clothing, and a smattering of punkish fare across every wall and flat surface. Oddly, the Stasi hadn’t seen fit to remove one square inch of it, and she had no idea why. Either they really wanted her to think they hadn’t bugged her room (which was ludicrous), or they left her items intact because she now worked for them. More probable was that they had decided to leave everything as dirt to use against her at the first sign of betrayal. She figured it was likely the latter reason.
Towards this end, she had figured that burning the lot of it would be the best course of action. But as she prepared to unceremoniously stuff her Sex Pistols album in a trash bag… well, she figured the Stasi would have taken pictures of her room anyway, so she might as well just count on that fact and keep her room the way it was. Perhaps this album and the ideas it represented were something worth taking the risk for.
“Oh my God, I love it!” Vivika gushed, “Your room is so… you!”
“Thank you.” Lena laughed awkwardly. “I like it.”
“No really, I mean it. This is exactly how I figured your room would look.”
Lena gave her the grand tour, starting at one wall and ending at the other. At first, she felt that the time would be wasted explaining bands that Vivika already knew, and telling stories that she was probably already familiar with. But not only did Vivika drink up most of the information, she seemed rather delighted with the lot of it. It also appeared that while Vivika had a lot to learn about certain subjects, she had a lot to teach Lena about others. Each rapid-fire lesson seemed to come with an adjoined story of lecherous and hedonistic atrocities so spiked and leather-clad, they could only be described as ‘band related’.
“He did what?!” Vivika squealed.
“Yeah! While crowd-surfing… it smelled sooooo bad!”
“In a Church, too?!”
Vivika especially gushed over her copy of Nevermind the Bullocks, paying it the exact same homage that Lena did. She rightfully recognized the importance of this album. Like many in the punk scene, the song ‘Holidays in the Sun’ had been a major turning point for her development as a youth. It seemed so strange that in a world of telephones, fax machines, and televisions that connected everything, the world seemed to fit in a box. And yet the Wall—only a physical barrier in reality—had still managed to separate them so completely from the outside world. Yet the fact that artists the world over not only had the same thoughts about the same things, but communicated in much the same languages—passing on styles, ideas and directions across closed borders to bloom like flowers, or incubate and fester like viruses—it brought such deep meaning and purpose to an otherwise bland and colorless existence inside the GDR.
“You mean everyone hates the Wall??” Vivika gasped.
“Everyone!” Lena laughed.
“In West Germany or just West Berlin?”
“Not even close,” Lena laughed harder. “The entire world. Trust me, everyone knows about it. It’s one of the most talked about things in existence.”
“How many artists care?”
“Literally all of them. To most artists—painters, musicians, you name it—not just the Wall, but the Stasi, the Spitzel, the Soviets, and the entire damn USSR are seen by pretty much every artist in the world as the most perfect metaphor for struggle.”
“That’s… that’s amazing.”
Vivika knew most of the musical zines, as most in the punk scene did. However, Lena’s copies of Shönheit (the feminist rag from the West) seemed to strike a major chord with her. Like many women, Vivika longed to be her own sovereign person. She wanted to go where she pleased, and do what she wanted to do. She felt a responsibility to her loved ones, sure; yet she didn’t want to be forcefully beholden to anyone or anything—least of all to a culture she didn’t even attest to. There were so many things that already stripped her of forward momentum—like poverty, the Eastern diet, the State, the Stasi, the Wall—that the last thing she needed was to have even more momentum stripped away simply because she had a vagina.