Read by Silas Hawkins
I strongly believe that it was not a unification.
A unification is born of diplomacy and compromise. What happened in East Germany was defeat, followed by surrender to a conquering imperialist power. The wall dividing the city of Berlin was pulled away in pieces. Hands, that were pre-conditioned to taking what they want, disregarding any greater good, reached through gaps in the barrier to plunder our resources. The night it happened, I witnessed a procession of tractors from our side disappearing forever through one of the checkpoints, into a cloud of deafening music and smoke.
In those times, when the east was still the east, I was happier, and thinner. Now I am miserable and I don't know the reason. The hairy slouch of my belly disgusts me.
You laugh, and it is true, it was ridiculous, but with less words there was more opportunity for reflection.
I sang them on the walk home, my voice rebounding back at me from the floodlit rampart nearby, that held the forces of capitalism at bay. With the barricade gone, so too has the echo that reaffirmed my faith. The words to the hymns have been restored, and yet they are strangely diminished.
I miss the silhouetted landmark of Contraband Hill; a mound of blue jeans slowly being turned into fertilizer for the gardens. They do not talk about the gardens of the east. They pretend it was all concrete and barbed wire. The flowers that were selected by committee, and planted in arrangements formally agreed upon by yet more committees, gave up their nectar to the bees who made their homes in cavities inside the wall. The east always had the best honey.
I know a man named Tessmer who worked as a border guard. He could hear the muted hum of the beehives in the concrete. He said it was like listening to a radio through a wall. After a while, he and his comrades began to hear patterns; words forming in the drone. He remains convinced that he heard the bees instructing the men to stand down, to throw open the gates, to tear down the wall.
I told him: “In more rational times, you would have been shot for such madness! What benefit is it to the insect colonies to be smoked out in swarms? The crust of their home set ablaze, the remnants caked in graffiti?”
Two years after the fall of East Germany, I crept onto a building site under cover of darkness. I filled a stolen wheelbarrow with a quantity of bricks and powdered cement. In a secluded area where the old wall once stood I constructed my own small barrier.
Others, independently of myself, had formed the same idea. Our unimposing walls, built piecemeal along the foundation of the old, were placeholders for a more permanent fortification that might one day return. I once saw a fellow builder emerge from the dead of night with a wheelbarrow of cement. We nodded at each other; a pair of ghosts, haunting ruins.
Before Christmas, I ran into Kaulitz, who is former secret police. Now I do not know how he makes his living. He asked me:
“Do you recall The Stables? It was the hotel where they took prisoners for interrogation.”
“It is gone,” I said “There is only rubble and waste ground.”
“They rebuilt it in South Africa! Now it is called Brandenburg Under the Sun. It is exactly the same, even the carpets and the wallpaper. The staff there are so rude and unhelpful. If you could not see the palm trees from the window, you would think it was East Berlin. They even have a piece of the old wall there. It is on a barge in the harbour, but eventually I think it will stand again in the grounds. I will return there soon for six months. You should go too, old friend. It will cheer your gloomy disposition.”
To pay for the trip I sold some possessions; my Stechkin automatic pistol. The wooden shoulder stock is over twice the length of the gun. I was using it as a doorstop.
The hotel is high on cliffs, set among gardens, surrounded by a wall that is like the old wall in Berlin in silhouette, but thin and made of bricks, like a theatre backdrop. At the foot of the cliffs, by the beach, there is a large, western-style hotel. It was a few days before I realised that both hotels were part of the same site, each for different types of guest.
The section of the original Berlin wall was no longer on the barge. It had been sunk offshore where it had become a foundation for a coral reef. Govender, one of the hotel workers told me that a condition of the purchase from Germany was that the wall should not stand again on dry land.
I realised then, that it was not enough for our enemies that the barricade be torn down. The wall was a jigsaw puzzle that had been broken up; the pieces torn into smaller pieces and scattered far and wide so they could never be gathered and reassembled. Nonetheless, the idea of it still remains.
“A lot of former East Germans who guarded the wall come to dive on the new reef,” said Govender. “Soon it will be covered in coral. If you go now you will see some of the original shape. It may be possible to go inside one of the towers.”
I did my scuba diving training in one of the outdoor pools at the western hotel. There were five others with me, all Americans. A red-haired women informed me she had distant family in Germany. She asked me where in the country I came from. I told her:
“From East Berlin.”
She put her hand on my arm and regarded me with affected sincerity:
“I watched the wall come down on TV. I sat on the couch holding hands with my daughter. We were both in tears.”
Walking back towards the cliff stairs, I encountered Kaulitz. He was reclined on a sun lounger, next to a guitar-shaped swimming pool that was crowded with families and children. A bent plastic straw, planted in the melting ice of a garish cocktail, was being blown around in the warm breeze like a weather vane.
“I have not seen you at the Brandenburg. What is your room number?” I asked him.
“I have defected to this hotel. It was the cold showers that did it for me. I am too old and soft in the body.”
He beckoned me to lean in closer.
“I require a favour. There is a maid who has been moved to the Brandenburg. They send the staff there who are miserable or rude to the guests. Her only crime is that her grandfather died. She loved him very much. Now she cries all the time. I need you to help get her reinstated in this hotel. I miss her singing as she cleans my room. She is a young girl and sweet, like a Holstein apple.”
“But how can I manage this?”
“Tell the manager that she smiles too much; her disposition is too cheery for East Berlin.”
I did not judge Kaulitz. We were both residents in a theme park. An approach has been found to capitalise upon my yearning to return to an old way of living.
Some of the bees from Berlin travelled with the ruin of the wall to South Africa. Their descendants have established colonies in the grounds of the Brandenburg. I watched one from my first floor window, a black speck meandering over the flower beds. On the horizon, the sparkling blue sea joined seamlessly with the sky.
The staff harvest the honey to serve at breakfast, but it tastes different.
I told a woman at the reception:
“The honey here is not authentic. You must plant in the gardens only these flowers, in the following arrangements.”
I passed her a paper napkin where I had written down the details. Later that day I saw it discarded in an otherwise empty wastepaper bin, next to the desk.
I returned to Berlin in February. In my absence, a group of western anarchists had mobilised to relocate the walls that had been built by myself and others. They have a website with a map showing the original position of the barriers, along the line of the old wall, and the new locations. Their leader, Jonas Klein, a former circus performer, had become a local celebrity.
One night when I was building, I felt eyes on me. When I turned, he was standing there.
“You are the man called Grawert?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I am going to take your wall from here when it is finished. I will move it to a different part of the city. I have already made a place for it. I have an artist who will paint a mural on it. One day I will build a house from your walls.”
“Why will you not leave me alone and respect my work? I will be dead soon and what happens to my walls afterwards will not trouble me.”
“Because you are building walls in a place where the city decided there should be none. And because they are good walls, constructed to a high standard. Why should we not use them elsewhere, and not as barriers, or relics of a world which has passed. What was better in the east when the city was divided? Name one thing.”
“The honey was better.”
“Pah!”
“Our knives, forks and spoons were made from heavier metal. They were better quality. Now everybody wants to buy them. I sold mine to pay for a holiday.”
“Like a true capitalist!”
“It is a game to you, all this. To me it is work; an expression of my politics.”
I swatted at him with my shovel. He dodged away with just his upper body.
“I was in the circus. You cannot hit me, old man.”
At home, I stared at the map on the computer. My walls dragged out of alignment into new settings, spray painted with banal slogans.
Wrapped in oilcloth in my desk drawer, there is a grenade from the war. I thought about how I would set it, so that it went off when my wall was disturbed. I pictured Klein's face the moment before it detonated. Would he attempt to dodge the explosion?
In the blurred corner of my fury, something on the map caught my eye: A pattern taking shape. Two walls close to each other. If I were to extend them, they would join to form a corner. There were two others nearby that could be connected a similar way. If they were all linked, they would form one side of a building.
I zoomed out. Everywhere on the map there were similar patterns: The sketch of a foundation for a new city that was neither east or west Berlin, created jointly by enemies unaware they were collaborators. If it is not a foundation, then perhaps it is the beginnings of a maze that we must build in tandem and then find our way through together.
The worker bee is part of a collective. It does not know the grand design that is brought into existence by its efforts. Yet it moves blindly, driven by instinct or programming towards some greater purpose.
(c) Mark Sadler 2019
Mark Sadler lives in Southend-on-Sea with a chameleon named Frederic. His short stories have recently appeared in The Ghastling and Litbreak magazine as well as Liars’ Leagues in London, New York & Hong Kong. He is writing a long novel that explores the conflicts arising between paganism and contemporary civil engineering.
Silas Hawkins continues the family voiceover tradition (he is the son of Peter 'Dalek' Hawkins & Rosemary 'Emergency Ward 10' Miller). Favourite voice credits: Summerton Mill,Latin Music USA & podcasts for The Register. Website: silashawkins.com Agents: [email protected] / [email protected].
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