Sektion 20 (2 page)

A squad of Soviet soldiers, all wearing combat medals, were lined up in a ceremonial parade. One of them was kneeling before the Soviet flag, which he was holding up to kiss.

‘Look,’ whispered Alex, pointing for Sophie to see. ‘He looks like he’s blowing his nose on it.’

She burst out laughing, then Alex felt her hand on his shoulder. ‘We’d better go,’ she said, eyeing up the Soviet guard at the far side of the aisle, ‘before Ivan there gives us a jab with his bayonet.’

As they walked home, Alex said, ‘My grandma’s always hated that memorial. She says the whole thing is a great big “sod off” from the Soviets to the people of Berlin. It says: “We are your conquerors. Behold our magnificence.”’

Sophie gasped. ‘Your granny said that?’

‘In so many words,’ said Alex. ‘She’s not very keen on the Russians.’

Sophie sensed his reluctance to say more. She respected it. You never knew, even with friends, what would get reported back. But she liked the way he had confided in her.

‘I suppose someone’s got to protect us from the Yanks,’ she said. ‘Keep us safe from rock music and a decent pair of jeans.’

Alex felt he could trust Sophie Kirsch. He was sure she wasn’t just playing along, trying to trick him into saying things that would get him into trouble with the Stasi.

The sun was going down now and a winter chill was biting through their coats. Alex said, ‘We’d better get home before it rains.’

When they reached her apartment, she said, ‘You know Emmy in our class?’ Alex nodded. ‘She’s asked me to her party a week on Friday. Are you going too? It’s over on Greifswalder Strasse, wherever that is.’

‘Yeah, she asked me,’ he said, trying to sound nonchalant. He had heard girls were put off if you seemed too keen. Alex sensed his heart beating a little faster. ‘Shall I come round and collect you?’ he asked.

‘Yes please. It’ll be nice to have someone to go with. Come at about seven? You can meet my mother and father too. That will be a treat for you both!’

Before he could answer, she’d gone.

Chapter 2

Alex puzzled over that remark as he walked up the six flights of stairs to his family apartment. It sounded like Sophie’s mother and father were both staunch Party members. But so were his, so perhaps he shouldn’t worry too much about it.

‘
Guten Abend
,’ he shouted, as he came into a hall cluttered with boots, coats and books. No one replied. Alex liked the old apartment where his family lived. It had three bedrooms, for a start, which meant he and his sister, Geli, had a room each. Most of his friends had to share their bedroom. And there were great high ceilings, which made the rooms seem even bigger. Alex wondered who his dad had had a quiet word with to get them in here. He wouldn’t have bribed anyone. That wasn’t Frank Ostermann’s style. But he was always attending Party committees and conferences. He knew all the right people.

Alex helped himself to a glass of milk and some blackberry jam on rye bread, then went to his bedroom to finish his homework. His art teacher had asked them to design a house or apartment for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik of the future.

Alex spent a good hour on it before he became distracted. His room annoyed him. He was too old for his Sandman doll there on the bookshelf, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. He had loved the TV series when he was younger. The adventures of the red-costumed character with the white beard, usually involving a trip into space, had enthralled him. When he was ten, he was convinced he was going to be a cosmonaut. It sounded more exciting than the other career options on offer, like power station engineer or tram driver.

There were also window stickers he had only partially succeeded in scraping off:
Wattfraß
, the little devil energy-waster who reminded them to save electricity;
Rumpelmann
, the environmental campaigner who reminded them to recycle. Alex had liked these cartoon characters when he was a kid, but he’d grown cynical about them now. It was like all the stuff they told them at school about Marx and Lenin. It was just the authorities trying to control what people did. 

He had started to feel like this about a lot of things he had previously accepted. It was the family car that had started it off. Everyone said how brilliant the Trabi – the Trabant – was. How it was proof that communism was best. How everyone would eventually have one and how reliable they were. But too often he had seen his father beneath the bonnet, fiddling with the engine . . .

The front door opened and broke Alex’s train of thought. He heard his sister, Geli, call hello, and went out into the hall to greet her.

She looked cross. ‘How was school?’ asked Alex.

She blew air through her lips. ‘Not good.’

Alex didn’t like to see Geli looking unhappy. He felt protective about her, even though she was two years older than him.

She had a kind face, with straight brown hair down to her shoulders and her fringe cut straight and level with her eyebrows. You might guess she was a nurse or a theology student. She wasn’t as fashion conscious as some of the other girls on her photography course, and liked to wear plain black clothes and a simple black woollen coat with a silver brooch on the collar. They weren’t the kind of clothes that got you noticed.

He made her a coffee as she told him what had happened.

‘You know Herr Lang, my photography tutor?’

Alex had met him once and wished his own teachers were more like him.

‘Well, he’s gone. No explanation. But I think I know why. He’d been encouraging us to experiment with our work. “Step outside the culture of socialist realism,” he said. “Not everything in art needs to glorify communism.” Well, that didn’t last long. They got rid of him over the holidays.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Alex. ‘Who’s the new tutor?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Geli. ‘We find out tomorrow.’

The door opened again as their parents – Frank and Gretchen – came home together. The room filled with the aroma of alcohol and tobacco and Alex guessed they had met for a tenants’ committee meeting in the local bar after work.

Gretchen had light brown hair and a rather severe demeanour. It came from years of teaching children at a polytechnic secondary school in Adlershof – one she was pleased Alex and Geli had not gone to.

Frank was a tall, handsome man with black hair and an intense, slightly forbidding air about him. He was an electrical engineer – TVs, radios, telephone exchanges . . . no one in his workplace knew more about transistors, circuits, valves and capacitors.

Drinking always made Frank a bit more cheerful. He ruffled Alex’s hair. ‘You need a haircut, my lad,’ he said with a smile. ‘Herr Roth told me at the Party committee meeting yesterday that you are starting to look like a rowdy.’

That made Alex smile. He wasn’t a rowdy at all. ‘Rowdy’ was what people of Frank’s generation called kids who vandalised bus stops and had fights in the street with rival football supporters. Kids like that would call Alex a hippy.

‘We need to tidy up a little,’ said Gretchen decisively. ‘Grandma is coming to tea.’

Grandma Ostermann was a stout and rather formidable-looking woman. Everything about her was curves – even the round felt hat that fitted snugly on her head over her round wrinkled face.

Alex and Geli had a soft spot for their grandma. She complained about how scruffy they were, but she always brought lovely chocolates back from her trips to West Berlin. Much better than the stodgy chocolates they could get, which tasted like they were made from lard.

The authorities didn’t mind old people going across the Wall to the other side. They didn’t even care if they stayed. It was the young and the workforce who were forbidden to travel to the West.

A loud knocking at the door heralded Grandma’s arrival. She stood huffing and puffing from her climb up the stairs. ‘
Um Gottes Willen!
’ she said. ‘Why can’t you live in a bungalow?’

She came into the living room, banged down a bag of West German coffee on the dining table, then immediately demanded that they close the curtains so that she didn’t have to look at the Soviet war memorial, which they could see through the window.

She turned to Alex and did what she always did when she came to the apartment: tugged on his hair. ‘You still have your girly locks! No girlfriends yet, I imagine. Especially looking like that!’

Alex laughed. He wasn’t going to take the bait.

Then she asked Geli, ‘And how is Jan-Carl?’

Jan-Carl was Geli’s boyfriend. Frank and Gretchen liked him. He was a project supervisor in the East Berlin machine tool industry. Geli had been more reckless in her choice with previous boyfriends, especially the one a couple of years ago who had distributed anti-Stasi leaflets he’d made on a child’s toy printer, but fortunately the authorities had taken no action against Geli on that occasion. She’d even managed to get into the local
Oberschule
to study for a place at technical college.

Geli smiled and told her grandma Jan-Carl was fine. Recently though, she’d been having her doubts about him. Especially as he made a habit of referring to her photography as her ‘little hobby’.

After they’d eaten, Frank and Gretchen insisted they miss their usual Tuesday night
Star Trek
on the Western TV. They would watch the East German channel instead. The family had missed the New Year TV spectacular earlier in the week and it was being repeated that evening.
Ein Kessel Buntes
– a Kettle of Colour – it was called.

‘More like a kettle full of crap,’ muttered their grandma under her breath. She detested that sort of thing. Alex and Geli exchanged a knowing look. It was their parents’ ploy to get her to go home early.

Before the programme started there was an advert for the Wartburg – the larger and more desirable East German alternative to the Trabi.

‘Can we get one of those, Vati?’ teased Alex. ‘Perhaps it’ll break down less!’

Frank laughed. ‘You have to wait ten, fifteen years for a Wartburg.’

The advert continued to extol its virtues ‘. . . and enough space in the boot for fifty-seven footballs.’

Alex said, ‘Why would anyone want fifty-seven footballs?’ and Grandma chuckled and dug him in the ribs with her elbow.

Ein Kessel Buntes
began with the sort of music that had been popular in the mid-sixties – a big brass arrangement with a rock and roll backbeat. Then there were dancers in top hats and sparkly jackets and stockings and high lace-up boots that were supposed to look sexy. They started to prance around in formation, singing about ‘starting something’. It could have been a romance by the way they were making eyes at the camera. But if you listened closely they were talking about starting a better life in the DDR. Then the camera cut from the studio to the same dance company in the great concrete shopping centre of Alexanderplatz, with the TV Tower in the background.

‘Proud of it, aren’t they,’ said Alex sarcastically. His parents ignored him.

Alex hated that tower. A great silver sphere perched on a slender stem, it had been opened last year and hailed as living proof that the DDR was the technological equal to any of the capitalist nations. You couldn’t get away from it. It was visible from every part of the city, east or west. Alex thought it looked like an enormous malevolent eyeball.

Grandma Ostermann understood. She cackled. ‘They couldn’t even get that right. The bottom half looks like a chemical works chimney and the top half looks like it’s been stolen from a power station.’

Frank and Gretchen shifted uncomfortably on their sofa. Grandma continued to needle them.

‘And that cross you can see at sunset. Oh dear . . .’

The tower had a design flaw that caused the sign of a cross to be reflected on the sphere high above the city whenever the evening sun caught it. They had heard the architect had been sent to prison for that. Alex wondered if he’d done it deliberately or if it was just an unlucky accident.

‘Do you want Alex to walk you home, Mutter?’ said Frank.

‘
Nein, danke,
’ she said with a smile. ‘Alex is a skinny thing. I would have to protect him if we ran into trouble.’ She got up to leave.

‘I’ll come anyway,’ said Alex. He’d had enough of
Ein Kessel Buntes
too and he wanted to stretch his legs.

‘The Russians aren’t that bad, are they?’ he asked as they walked along the edge of the park. They could see the brightly lit war memorial through the bare trees. ‘They got rid of the Nazis, didn’t they?’

‘They stripped our country bare,’ she said. ‘Whole factories. The rails and sleepers from the train lines. Our best scientists . . . and our soldiers. When your grandfather came back from his Russian prison camp after the war, he was skin and bone. You could hardly recognise him. No wonder he died young.’

Alex liked the way his grandma said what she thought. When they were alone, she would remark scornfully how much the DDR was like the Third Reich. ‘They think they’re 180 degrees apart,’ she snorted. ‘But just look at them. Free German Youth, just like Hitler Youth; the Stasi, just like the Gestapo; Bautzen, just like Dachau. If they hadn’t built the Wall to keep everyone from escaping, there’d just be the Stasi and a handful of Socialist Unity Party
Dummköpf
s left in the country. You watch how you go, young Alex. You don’t want them to take an interest in you.’