Under the Limes

8:45 a.m., 2nd November, 1968, on the Berlin U6 Line between
Reinickendorfer Stra?e and
Schwartzkopffstra?e



Today's weather has come all the way from the Russian
steppes, and it stirs our black and gold leaves, pushes the stray dogs
into doorways and closes the windows of the city.


My moods are like these winds. In concert they make the
weather of my soul. Down here in the underground, as my carriage
rattles through Berlin's concrete gut, I should be sheltered, but I am
not. It is cold here. I hug my shawl.


There is a flower in the hair of the woman in front of me. I
remember when Werner and I broke apart a window box for the rumour of a
potato.


I will tell you about Werner, who was my twin
brother.


My mother, who is now speechless, is French. In 1936, she was
working in Berlin as an au pair when she first saw my father sitting in
his wooden kiosk beneath a beautiful parade of trees. We Berliners
called this street Under den Linden, which translates as 'under the
limes'. The trees were dear to us. The trees made two parallel lines,
so that each has a companion across the expanse of the
street.


My mother approached my father out of pity. There was little
business. Germany was mobilizing and vibrant, but the foundation of its
strength was rotten years of hyperinflation, anxiety and resentment.
Traders still went hungry. My father guessed her star sign, produced a
coin from her ear, and married her. There was no crockery to break at
their wedding, but they were happy.


Imagine the vibrancy of the limes on Under den Linden.
Imagine the playful wind weaving thread-like through the tress, sewing
the pairs together. Before the war, those trees were unplugged by
Hitler. They obscured the view of his military parades. The replanted
trees are youthful and tender, but the street is the same, held in
trust by our generous neighbour, the German Democratic Republic.



He - my father - joined the army in early 1941. My twin
brother and I were born when he was in Poland. He returned to us twice
before dying anonymously in Stalingrad. Werner and I never knew him and
he never knew us. I have a photograph of a broken fountain once ringed
by dancing, stone children. In my dreams it is a deep well and my
father is still drowning in its black waters.


Werner liked to play with the last unbroken soldiers in our
father's old toy box. Mother would watch him wistfully, reminded of
something. I played with rats. I tamed one but was forced to eat it
three days before the surrender. Tired British soldiers patrolling our
sector. The British had adopted us. Others in Berlin were adopted by
the Americans, the French, and the Russians. I learned my first English
words in an improvised school that ran for an hour a day in an old
church two blocks away. I was taught by a British priest who spoke
slow, flawless German through his nose. Werner did not attend. He was
content to play truant with his lead soldiers and win money from the
British soldiers with his ball-and-shell game. Like our father, he had
inherited a sleight of hand. When I was crying, sitting forlornly in
rubble, he would cheer me up by drawing a coin from my ear.



It took twenty years for the Wall to come. But it came as
quickly as an earthquake in the night. First a fence, then concrete.
Werner had been staying with friends in the east and was trapped. He
phoned us breathlessly a month later. He had new friends. He was
joining the army. He would be a soldier like his father. I cried for a
week at this amputation.


The thump of a bent rail puts me back in the underground
carriage. The atmosphere has changed. The train has travelled into East
Berlin. Above us, the surface has been cut in two by the Wall, but down
here, the old routes of the underground must be observed. The train,
though it travels from one West Berlin station to another, will briefly
pass forbidden stations in the East. It will dare not stop.



The train slows and I look to my left. The lights of this
platform are dimmed. It is empty of passengers. The station sign for
Schwartzkopfstra?e looks no different from those of the Allied Sector,
but the convex metal plate wears a toupee of dust unmoved since the
Wall's unhappy birth. All exits from this station are blocked. In the
centre of the platform, the rotunda once been occupied by a taciturn
newspaper seller is now home to a tall soldier in a greatcoat offering
his naked hands to a stove. He ignores the train and my face pressed to
the glass. His rifle leans outside, its nozzle poking through an empty
panel. The guard dog is absent.


My heart turns like a tired motor. I have only seconds left.



"Werner!"


I feel movement in my fellow passengers. Perhaps they have
turned, rescued from their boredom, to look at me pityingly as I go mad
against the glass.


I slap the window again, lost in myself. "Werner!"



The guard in the rotunda only watches me. He is too tall to
be Werner. Even if he were, he would be unable to acknowledge my
presence without risking a court martial. I sink to my seat. Another
journey has been wasted. Perhaps, I think, my informant was wrong.
Perhaps Werner is no longer a guard in this station. Perhaps he has
been posted into Mother Russia like our father, where a deep well waits
to drown him.


Then, in the corner of the station, close to the exit, I see
the sudden orange of a cigarette, and the dim shapes of a man and a
dog. The man has been watching me.


I stare as he flicks away his cigarette. In the smallest of
moments before the train clears the station, he draws a second
cigarette from the cavernous ear of the dog. Then darkness shuts the
window. I sag into my seat and meet the stares of my fellow Berliners
with a smile. Werner and I, us twins, are together for a flash of time;
for the briefest sleight of his hand.


Air sweeps through the carriage. A warm wind. For a moment,
the weather of my soul is fine.