Paris felt strongly like a home – an idealized home – by the end of my first stay there, which lasted three days. That was a period long enough for me to settle into a routine, short enough that the routine never became less than enthralling. I would rise in the morning and, before breakfast, wander a bit around the four-story house with its accumulated family history. Breakfast was always baguettes with my butter, jams, marmalades, or French cheeses. There was also tea and orange juice, and if I was up early enough and Marguerite was cooking breakfast, she would make me bacon and eggs as well. But the baguettes – never sliced, but torn off and split with my hands into top and bottom halves – were always enough for a full breakfast. All my life prior to that, five or six days of the week at least, breakfast had meant cold cereal. I was somewhat surprised how quickly I could change my routine to having something quite unfamiliar, and much better, for my first meal of the day.
After breakfast and more wandering about the house and back yard, I would leave the house, walk down to the center of Champigny sur Marne, and catch the RER train into the city. After losing myself in the streets of Paris for a few hours, I’d catch a train back home. This would usually be around eight or so. As enticed as I was by the idea of Parisian nightlife, it started too late at night to catch an RER home afterwards, and it was too expensive anyway. Tobey would still be up when I arrived home at around eight or nine, and we’d talk about my day of exploring and her day of dealing with the bureaucracy of the Sorbonne administration. (Her truly workaday routine made me feel somehow that this was real, everyday life I was experiencing.) Then I’d go to bed, and the next morning resume my occupation of luxuriating and wandering.
My first full day in France, Tobey accompanied me on my trip into the city. We both slept in that morning and spent several hours unpacking, talking, and relaxing in our home, and it wasn’t until late in the afternoon that we got on the RER train. But that turned out to be the ideal time to be introduced to Paris.
Tobey took me on a walking tour of the most enchanting sights for the first-time visitor. By the time we got off the train at the Tuileries gardens, the sun was casting long shadows. We wandered through the gardens, then made our way westward. By then the sunlight through the city’s haze was casting the city in a golden then rusty orange glow.
While walking across the Place de la Concorde, we noticed a fashion model shoot; probably for a magazine, we decided, since the half dozen photographers all had very high-quality still cameras. All the high-class elegance that Paris epitomized – I just walk down the street and it’s there, I felt at that moment. The model was slim, dark-featured, aristocratic-looking, and absolutely poised; she looked like the quintessential Parisian model, despite looking close to falling out her black gown. At one point a woman adjusted her dress, pulling her neckline down to make her bustline look even more precarious.
At the edge of the Place I caught my first glimpse of the Arc de Triomphe, through a corridor between banks of trees, hazy and distant – an apparition like St. Basil’s in Moscow. The corridor was Champs d’Elysses. We walked it, noting the obviously expensive shops, American Express office, and American-style hamburger place. It seemed to me that success had spoiled the beauty the Champs d’Elysses traded on, or maybe I was naive in expecting a more dreamy, ethereal place. Or perhaps the charm of the street was only evident to very rich shoppers. But it was still a beautiful walk, close to sunset as it was.
Near the apex of the Champs d’Elysses – where it meets the traffic circle that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe – Tobey suggested I go to the island between the lanes and check out the view. As soon as there was a break in the dense, rushing traffic, I did. The experience just of standing there, facing the Arc, was like an amusement park ride: terrifying to the senses, with the traffic tearing through much too fast and mere inches from me, yet (almost) certain of my safety, guarded as I was by enough concrete in the traffic island to fend off any of the insane motorists who happened to lose control.
We crossed one of Paris’ old bridges as the sky was turning an almost scarlet color, and the lights of the city were starting to come on. I was in love with Paris by now. The hazy fall evening was the perfect time for Tobey to show me Paris, and the most romantic setting imaginable for two platonic friends.
Ever since I was a teenager, the streets of downtown Portland were my preferred setting for wandering, lost in though, pondering philosophical questions or quandaries about the latest girl I was interested in. Paris, by its reputation, seemed the very archetype of a musing city, so I was eagerly looking forward to a trip downtown by myself the next day.
The city didn’t disappoint me. Paris is a walking city. Even more than other European cities that were built long before there were automobiles, and more than the Chinese and Soviet cities of which very few inhabitants could afford cars, Paris was maintained to be a walking city, not a driving city. (The more I saw of the thoroughly congested traffic at hell-bent speeds, starting with my head-on view of Champs d’Elysses traffic, the more I was convinced that you’d have to be insane to drive in Paris. And, seeing the cars wedged diagonally halfway on the sidewalk and halfway on the street, with centimeters separating them, convinced me that finding a parking space was also a desperate act.) Paris very carefully and self-consciously preserved not only the artifacts of its incredibly rich culture and history – cathedrals, monuments, museums, ancient sewers – but also its residential life. The city was composed of its neighborhoods; its people and the life they led. Commercial developments that in an American city would displace the residents of whole neighborhoods from their downtown homes, were instead shunted off to suburban business zones like La Defence. There were very few new buildings in Paris proper. The times that a good-sized piece of real estate opened up to new development, such as when the farmers’ markets at Les Halles were torn down after 850 years, were rare enough to cause major events in architectural history.
There were paradoxes about Paris, which seemed to me to stem from the quandary that if Paris were really as open, human, and accessible as it aspires to be, it would be destroyed by its own popularity. Despite its lofty image, the city felt very accessible to pedestrians such as me (except financially). Despite the legendary contemptuousness of its residents, the city felt welcoming. Sidewalk cafes really did seem to be everywhere (expensive as they were; even more so if you wanted to sit at a sidewalk table). And, as my brother had observed, everything in the city was human-scaled – no taller than four or five stories, with just about everything important at street level – with the exception of the most famous landmarks in the city, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe.
In my cherished pastime of walking the streets by myself, Paris made me feel not only right at home, but as part of a kind of introspective elite. I was the latest of a long line of Americans to come to Paris to muse: Lost Generation writers, jazz musicians, Jim Morrison, my older brother – and connected as well to the tradition of French intellectuals, from Voltaire to Michel Foucault, who must have gained the seeds of their ideas while walking these streets – didn’t they?
I became accustomed to the profusion of historical monuments in Paris. So had the Parisians, evidently. One rainy dusk, I was leaving the excavated site of an ancient Roman bath near the center of the city. (Like Portland, Paris had fickle weather, changing from golden sunlight to dark, foreboding clouds, to melancholy drizzle – weather that seemed to be expressly generated to mirror my moods.) Nearby, I came upon a small grassy square surrounding a stone gazebo, which was built around a statue. Compared to all the numerous big squares and monuments in Paris, this one was ill-maintained. The inside of the gazebo was littered and stank in the wet weather, the statue and gazebo were spewed with graffiti, and the green was not kept up. It had apparently long ago fallen to the status of second-class monument.
The statue was of Blaise Pascal. I felt hurt – he was one of my favorite theological philosophers in college, as well as a pioneering mathematician and the namesake of my most used computer language. I had learned about him in two very different university courses. In Studies in Western Culture, I learned Pascal had done somewhat notable mathematical work before “the interesting part of his life began” when he delved into the nature of man’s relationship to God. In Computer Programming 201, he was a brilliant innovator in statistical science before he “kind of went off the deep end.” Here in Paris, where there were so many more famous dead people honored, Pascal’s monument was a low-key affair, treated by the local kids like some abandoned parking lot. Such were Paris’s urban decay problems.
I wanted to be sure to see the Pompidou Centre. Its creation was one of the controversial architectural events that followed the destruction of Les Halles: a museum with the escalators, plumbing, ventilation ducts and other workings on the outside instead of the inside. I wasn’t aware until I got there that the human life of the place seemed to be also on the outside instead of inside. The large plaza in front of the museum had street performers everywhere, with overlapping circles of audience surrounding them. Since this was Paris, each performer had an edge of distinctiveness – not necessarily talent, but distinctiveness.
One of the largest crowds was gathered around a balding Indochinese man. He played guitar and sang Beatles songs at slowed-down tempos. In between carefully enunciated, heavily accented phrases of a song, he would smile engagingly at the crowd, drinking in every bit of their generously bestowed attention. His enthusiasm, in fact, outshone his musical ability. More to the point, he sucked, but he was such a unique performer and exuded so much joy that he was the best-loved performer there.
The performer I remember most was a tiny Japanese performance artist. Dressed in a sheer black leotard, she emerged very, very slowly from a large gray plastic bag – twisting, writhing, and finally emerging with gestures that suggested blooming or birth. I couldn’t imagine anyplace but Paris where you’d see something like this as a street performance. When I came back to the city and to the plaza two weeks later, I saw her again. She was doing the same bag piece, and the second time around it wasn’t as interesting to me. I was disappointed by her limited repertoire; I felt like yelling, “Hey! We’ve already seen ‘Birth’! Do something different, like ‘Death.’”
The following Sunday afternoon I was riding a TGV bullet train bound for Lausanne, Switzerland, by myself, feeling both exhilarated and cast adrift. It hadn’t struck me as a momentous occasion when I’d boarded the train, but here I was, for the first time, bravely venturing out into Europe alone.
It was time to travel again. Paris was my home base, so I could see more of its sights in a couple of weeks, but German Reunification was only a few days away. Now, I had just enough time to spend a couple days hiking in the Swiss Alps, then take a quick train ride across the border to southern Germany – Munich or Stuttgart, maybe – for Reunification.
The moment I left Paris didn’t feel momentous, but it was a nervous occasion for me. Besides being alone in a foreign country for the first time, I’d left Champigny in a big hurry and was certain I’d forgotten some things in my long list of items I might need for spending two weeks or so in Switzerland, Germany, and who knows what other completely unfamiliar places.
Rushing through Gare de Lyon station, I made it to the platform in the nick of time, only to discover I was an hour early due to French daylight savings time ending. This gave me time to make an important call to Tobey about three postcards I’d written and left at the house; I had forgotten to ask her to send them. She had given me a phone number, but it included country code, city code, and whatever other codes I wasn’t sure whether I needed to dial while I was still in Paris. When I found a pay phone, I tried the number she’d given me and, when that didn’t work, various portions of it, but I couldn’t get through. I would either get no response, or a recorded message in French. Suddenly I had the suspicion that Tobey had given me the wrong number accidentally. If this were true, I wouldn’t be able to get hold of her from anywhere in Europe, so, I decided, I’d better get the right number right now while I’m still in Paris. I finally found a French woman to help me dial directory information for Marguerite Kramer. The number I had was correct after all, I found out, and the woman dialed it for me. (I never did find out what I had been doing wrong the first few times I’d tried dialing.) By then it was eight minutes before train departure time. I told Tobey in a panicked voice to be sure to mail the postcards. She must have wondered what was so urgent about them.
The train cruised along very smoothly, accelerating toward its top speed of 180 MPH. I looked out the window and watched the streets of suburban Paris whiz by, about one every second. I felt like I was in a jet airplane speeding down the runway but never quite taking off.
Finally I was alone in unknown parts of Europe. Feeling self-conscious and unsure of myself, I didn’t talk to anyone on the train. Now would be a good time, I decided, to start reading Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker, which a friend had lent me a year before but which I had never gotten around to read. Amid the wild adventures described – only slightly more absurd and unpredictable than what Tobey and I had experienced – Robbins quoted a passage by Kafka which seemed to hint at what lay ahead for me:
You don’t need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don’t even listen, simply wait.
Don’t even wait.
Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you.
To be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Four and a half hours after leaving Paris, the train arrived in Lausanne. I liked Lausanne as soon as I walked out of the station and looked up: built onto a steep Alpine hillside above Lake Geneva, it was a vertical city like Seattle or San Francisco. There were walkways that crossed urban canyons, from one street-level sidewalk to another, over a boulevard seventy feet below. This was a city that used the third spatial dimension effectively. Perched on the highest hill in the city was, of course, the cathedral, and this one looked particularly charming. It was one of those high places I’m drawn to, and I marked it as something to explore the next day.
It was about five in the evening and mostly cloudy. I walked the steep, winding, shop-lined street just outside the train station. I was delighted: here I was, alone by hundreds of miles, exploring a lovely little city I’d discovered myself. (Actually, it was Tobey’s idea to come here originally, before she’d lost her Eurailpass.) I walked down an alley between two hotels, and at the end was my first beautiful view of Lake Geneva and the Alps beyond.
Soon after the exhilaration of being alone in a strange city came the corresponding feeling of pressing responsibility. It was up to me, and me alone, to find a place to eat that was reasonably priced (considering the money I carried didn’t go nearly as far as my money had in Russia), a place to sleep, and a public transportation system that would take me there.
I knew where I would probably stay: the IYHF (International Youth Hostel Federation) youth hostel listed in my Let’s Go: Europe guide. I bought a map of Lausanne and located on it the hostel, as well as the city’s metro system: a single line running, surprisingly, perpendicular to most of the winding streets on the map. With the help of the map, I found a metro station. The metro turned out to be a line going straight up the side of a hill at about a forty degree angle, carrying a cable car. Lausanne, evidently, was too hilly to be suited for a conventional subway system, and the sole purpose of this metro line was to serve as an elevator, saving people from having to ride the busses up the circuitous streets from one level of town to another. I took the metro down to the bottom, to the shore of Lake Geneva.
The youth hostel was about a mile and a half down a boulevard that ran along the lake shore, and since I didn’t know when next bus would come, I decided to walk. My backpack soon started feeling burdensome (it didn’t seem much lighter for having left half my stuff in Paris, frustratingly), as did my guitar, which later in the trip would become an almost unnoticeable extension of my arm.
After walking less than a mile, I saw something I hadn’t expected. The circus was in town. This was Cirque Knie, one of Switzerland’s major touring circuses. I was feeling curious and adventurous, but also very aware of how fast money was going. (The metro cost over a dollar, rather than under a nickel as it had been in China and Russia.) The show had started about twenty minutes earlier, and it was nine Swiss francs (almost nine dollars) for the cheapest seats. I wrestled with myself for about half an hour about whether to go in. It looks fun, and the music sounded great from outside. Then again, I could see a circus back in the states any time. Then again, this was one of those serendipitous occurrences that traveling was all about – the world was freely offering itself to me – and it called for a free and spontaneous attitude. Then again, I haven’t even found the youth hostel yet, much less checked in. And so on. Finally, I shelled out the money and went in.
It was a wonderful show. This was my very first circus, actually – in Switzerland, of all places – and it was glamorous and exciting. The brass band, far from being background music, really set the mood of each act of the show. There was one more surprise in store: the French-speaking announcer said something about “Ulan Bator,” and brought on an acrobatic group, “Troupe Mongolia”! I felt privileged: to everyone else, this group is from some obscure, exotic Eastern land – but I had been there.
Afterwards I walked the rest of the way to the hostel. When I arrived and checked in, I found that the other thing I forgot in Paris was my IYHF youth hostel card. The man at the desk let me in on the discount rate anyway.
Entering my room, I beheld my youth hostel roommates for the first time: three swarthy youths, evidently from a Mediterranean country, who spoke a language I didn’t recognize, and who pretty much ignored me. They wore tight T-shirts and serious expressions, and to my untraveled eyes, looked vaguely menacing.
This was my long-awaited first night in a youth hostel in Europe, and I had read enough guidebooks and young backpackers’ accounts to know what was expected of me: I was supposed to introduce myself to them, swap travel stories, and become lifelong friends. But what if I didn’t feel like it? I was tired and miserably hungry by now; agonizing over whether to go into the circus hadn’t left me any time for dinner. I felt like a lousy redneck bigot for snubbing these guys, but I didn’t care. There’s no law, I told myself, that says I have to have some culture-bridging experience with these losers just because I’m in a youth hostel for the first time. I didn’t occur to me that they might not want to meet me either, or that nobody really tries to keep up the stereotypical hand-across-the-seas cheery sociability every day in Europe. I decided to be chauvinistic and provincial, and I put my overnight stuff under the bed and left.
Since I had no idea where to get food at ten at night on the outskirts of a small city in the Swiss Alps, and I was still feeling paranoid about money, dinner consisted of bread with Chinese peanut paste and soup from a vending machine. It filled me up, surprisingly. Even food this bad could make a meal if I ate enough of it – this was a useful traveling tip I discovered. And the only real challenge was overcoming the boredom of eating that much bread and peanut paste.
I got up too late the next morning for the hostel’s breakfast. This hostel, like most, was on a bright and early schedule that I hadn’t yet adjusted to, so I was still in the shower when they were starting to vacuum the floors.
That morning I went exploring on the lake shore, up to the cathedral, and along the hillside streets in between. I bought a pastry and a sandwich from a sidewalk kiosk and had a walking breakfast. I found the city’s American Express office and bought more traveler’s checques, and felt better about the money situation.
By then it had started to rain. I considered going on to Bern early that afternoon. As fond as I was of Lausanne, I decided my time would be better spent sightseeing from a train than on giving myself a walking tour while constantly ducking in out of the rain. And I was on a schedule, after all. So back to the train station I headed.
After leaving Lausanne, the train went along the hillside above the shore of Lake Geneva, giving exquisite views of the mist on the lake and the clouds that hugged the mountains. It got cloudier, thought, especially after leaving the lake, and it rained hard most of the afternoon. My original plan for Switzerland had been to find someplace further up in the Alps to go hiking, spend the night in some cozy Alpine hostel, and head the next day to Germany to take in the Reunification that evening. This plan was looking less attractive, though, especially the hiking part. I couldn’t even see the Alps through the clouds, and I didn’t imagine the view would get any better when I was in the clouds rather than underneath them. And the only shoes I had were my New Balances, certainly not the ideal footwear for hiking on slippery mud on Alpine mountainsides.
At Bern, I got out to transfer to the Lucerne-bound train. The one thing I remember about Bern during my few minutes there was that all the signs were in German, a little more than an hour after being in a thoroughly French-speaking area, without having crossed any international boundaries. This tiny country with four official languages, each one spoken exclusively in its little region, took some getting used to.
I had a thought in Bern. My Eurail schedule listed a night train from Zurich to Hannover, Germany, which is only three or four hours from Berlin. If I wanted to be at the heart of the action during Reunification, I thought, Berlin would be it. It was several hundred miles away, yes, but there was no compelling reason for me to stay in Switzerland. I made a spur of the moment decision to skip the rest of Switzerland, take the next train to Zurich, and head for Hannover and Berlin. It was the most clearly correct decision of the trip.
I had three hours to spend in Zurich, which was clean, wealthy, and boring. Admittedly, it didn’t help that it was dark by the time I arrived and I couldn’t see any scenery. Zurich, at least judging from the streets I was able to explore in an hour, was essentially a huge outdoor mall full of the more expensive of Europe’s specialty chain stores: Benneton, Sisley, Victoria’s Secret. Down below the train station were more unaffordable shops in a surprisingly large underground mall-cavern. With no stores that were appropriate to my traveling budget, or that couldn’t be found elsewhere, and no sense of history that I could detect, Zurich had very little to interest me. Apart from having a pizza dinner, I killed most of the three hours it the same unimaginative way I kill time in an American airport: by reading the magazines on the rack of the local newsstand.
The train from Zurich to Hannover was my first experience in a “couchette” cabin. This was one more thing an American traveler could envy about the European train system: rather than trying to sleep in a contorted position on a somewhat reclined seat, or paying through the nose for a private cabin, private sink, and other amenities unnecessary to a night’s sleep, the couchette provided a simple horizontal, padded surface to sleep on – six per cabin – and sheets and a blanket. The supplemental charge was less than most of the hostels charged for a night’s stay. Thus I was introduced to the budget traveler’s concept of the “Eurail hotel”: saving money by sleeping en route.
I arrived in Berlin on the eve of Reunification with nowhere to stay. Although I didn’t know it at the time, fortunately – otherwise I would have panicked right away – this was an incredibly risky thing to do. The Zoologischer Garten train station was a lot more crowded than when I had been there a week and a half before, and seemed to get more so by the minute. My first order of business was to push my way through the crowds and get to a phone to make reservations somewhere. This, inconveniently, seemed to be everyone’s first order of business.
Even though it was one of the largest train stations I’d been in during the trip, the Zoo station had a total of about ten public phones as far as I could see, all of them off in a corner next to the lockers. The phones, I found out after waiting in line for about ten minutes, tended to reject about three of every four Deutchemark coins I had for no discernible reason. One man told me that if you rub the face of one on the phone, it would work better. I tried this; it seemed to work.
The first place I called, Charlottenburger Hof, was full. Hoping not to antagonize the people in line behind me, I looked in Let’s Go for numbers of alternate lodging. This was a completely futile exercise, but I didn’t know that until an American traveler informed me that every place listed in Let’s Go, or any other travel guide, was booked solid. Fortunately, he also told me I could get a place to stay through the Berlin tourist office. It was just a couple blocks away, he said, down the street past the McDonald’s.
The Berliners had planned this well. The tourist office was full of travelers without reservations, either lounging about or lined up waiting to throw themselves at the mercy of the staff. The office personnel, amazingly, appeared to be able to help every single visitor. They got to me after about thirty minutes. The man behind the desk asked me if I wanted a hotel or a private residence.
“Private residence?” I asked.
The city, he explained, correctly projected that there would be many more visitors for Reunification than its hotels could possibly hold. Therefore, ads were placed in the paper in recent weeks asking residents if they would put up foreign visitors in their homes. This was when I first got the inkling that Berlin’s celebration would dwarf any other Reunification event in Germany.
Since the only hotel rooms left were over 100 Deutschemarks a night (about $60), the private residence, at DM30, sounded attractive. I would get my own key to use, the man said; it wouldn’t be much different than staying at a hotel. I signed up. Twenty minutes later they had a name and an address to give me: I would be staying at Frau Foth’s on Elberfelderstrasse, not far from the center of town. They showed me which U-bahn to take, where to get off, and which bus line to take from there.
So, I walked back to the Zoo station, found the platform for the right train going the right direction, took it to the prescribed stop, and caught the bus the rest of the way. This went considerably smoother than I thought it would, after all the times I lost track of where I was on the metro systems of Moscow, Leningrad, and Berlin a week earlier. Then I remembered that I’d gotten similarly disoriented in Paris – until I started taking the trains by myself. I started to figure it out: by myself, when I’m the one who has to figure it out a transit system, I’m very adept at it. But when I’m with a group, one with a leader who knows what he or she is doing – even a group of two, such as Tobey and me – I’d fall into the habit of following the group, trusting the leader, taking in the scenery, and ending up at the final destination with no idea how I got there. (Perhaps it was due to being a little brother and the baby of the family: my older brother and parents would always take charge and allow me the luxury of daydreaming throughout a trip.) This contrast surprised and confused more people than just me. Our first evening in Paris, I hardly paid attention to where we were going, even as Tobey was explaining where we were. But after I’d gone to Paris by myself, when Tobey would start explaining again how to use the RER and Metro lines, I’d be correcting her.
Frau Foth lived in a dense residential area full of large, old multi-story apartment buildings. A narrow, windowless stairwell led to her flat, but the apartment itself was spacious and homey – much better than I expected, especially having scrambled that morning to find any place to sleep at all. It was early afternoon, and there was nothing I needed to do until the festivities that night. I took a shower and then napped.
I had planned to be an unobtrusive boarder in whatever home I was sent to, but my hostess indulged me and made me feel unexpectedly welcome. Frau Foth – her given name was Elisabeth – was around sixty, and spoke fluent English. Of her two sons, the elder was in his forties, married and settled. I stayed in her younger son’s old bedroom. He was a few years older than me, a computer science student who was then doing some traveling. Living by herself, Frau Foth was glad to have the company of a house guest; especially someone who reminded her so much of her younger son.
During my stay, she told me some of the history of her family. Before World War II, they owned a house in Berlin, which they had bought from a Jewish man. When Germany surrendered, the Allies made German citizens return all property they had purchased from Jews. Despite the presupposition in the Allies’ order, she said, her family had paid the man a fair price; they had not taken advantage of the him because he was Jewish. But her family acceded to the order. As it turned out, the man didn’t want the house back anyway, but her family lost it nonetheless.
Her voice had a tone of sad resignation – an undeserved wrong had been done to her family – but there was no bitterness, no ill feelings directed toward wrongdoers past or present. Several years after the war, her family moved to Australia for about ten years before returning to Germany. It was in Australia she learned her English.
I was curious about what life was like during the Nazi years for her family. But there was never a time I could have asked her about it; the thought of asking was as unimaginable to me as the Third Reich itself.
It was almost sundown when I awoke from my nap. The program booklet I’d picked up from the tourist office, Einheit (“Reunification”, or “One-hood”), had a schedule of the music, speeches, and other events that evening and early morning. Although it was written in German, a lot of listings, especially ones I was interested in, were described by borrowed words from English, such as Jazz and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Things would be starting around six in the evening. Most of the events were happening on a long east-west thoroughfare between Alexanderplatz to the east and Brandenburg Gate to the west. The thoroughfare, like other European boulevards, was named as several short boulevards (Strasse des 17.Juni, Unter den Linden, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse) even though it carried a continuous stream of traffic along its course. Brandenburg Gate was on the border of East and West Berlin, near where the Wall had stood until recently, and so almost all of the celebrations would be in the soon-to-be-formerly-East Berlin. I figured East Berlin not only had broader and less trafficked boulevards, but also no private businesses to be disrupted by all the revelry.
From Elberfelderstrasse to Brandenburg Gate was a good two and a half miles. I could have taken the bus or train – which were free that night to anyone wearing a “3-Okt-90” button, which the man at the tourist office had given me – but I was determined to walk it. From the quiet neighborhood of Elberfelderstrasse to the mighty epicenter of the nationwide celebration at Brandenburg Gate, the walk would allow the evening’s drama to slowly build. Each street would be closer to Brandenburg Gate; each minute closer to a reunited Germany.
Exciting as it was, it was hard for me to convince myself of the historical auspiciousness of the occasion. I don’t think one gets a mythic, legendary sense of “An Historic Event” being there oneself, seeing everything merely life-sized. Besides, this was a planned historical event. To have been there when the Berlin Wall first, unexpectedly, opened up, on the other hand – now that, to me, would have been history!
(As I write this, I’m conscious that from here on it’s a well-chronicled historical event that I’m describing. All the little details that would otherwise be mere personal recollections, such as the partly cloudy night, can be checked against historical accounts of the evening. So I’d better get it right.)
It was a partly cloudy night. Frau Foth, who would just as soon watch the whole madhouse on television, bid me a good evening and reassured me that I could come home at any hour I wished. I walked to the west end of the Tiergarten, “Berlin’s Central Park,” once the hunting grounds of the Berlin royalty. The broad Strasse des 17.Juni stretched out eastward toward Brandenburg Gate, with woods on either side. As I walked down the boulevard I gradually noticed more and more people walking with me; the human stream heading towards Unter den Linden was getting steadier and thicker. 17.Juni led almost directly to Brandenburg Gate but, to put off my climactic arrival at the Gate, I took a detour and joined the celebration a little ways eastward near Alexanderplatz.
Alexanderplatz, East Berlin’s huge central square, was packed with probably the largest crowd I’d even seen. I heard later that a million people were out on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse and Unter den Linden that night; Alexanderplatz must have counted for a substantial fraction of them.
Beer and sausage stands were all around. They sold Pilsner in plastic cups and bratwurst with rolls, just as concession stands state fairs in the United States sell Budweiser and hot dogs. The difference here was the excellent German beer and bratwurst that would put any American frankfurter to shame. These cheap and ubiquitous stands allowed me a luxury I hadn’t had since leaving home, impulse snacking. (In China and Russia, there were no impulse snacks to be found; in France and Switzerland, they were prohibitively expensive.) I subsisted on bratwurst and beer throughout most of my stay in Berlin.
Alexanderplatz would have made a good-size festival by itself. Wandering, I passed several stages with various musical groups playing. One band was playing American rhythm and blues standards; familiar, welcome sounds to me. Finally, here was some music I could dance to, and a big outdoor space to dance in! Most of the audience didn’t have the same idea, though; the only ones that were dancing were doing so because they were drunk and uninhibited. Why couldn’t the rest of the audience let go of their German stuffiness, I wondered, and start moving to the music before they were too inebriated to do so gracefully? But I had a great time dancing myself.
This was my introduction to European rhythm and blues. The band had energy and their urgent, pulsing Motown rhythms were dead-on. The singer had a gutsy, passionate contralto voice – yet to my ears she sounded somewhat inauthentic. Her slight German accent threw off the nuances of the lyrics a little bit. In contrast to all the European art forms that Americans weren’t quite able to capture, ‘60’s rhythm and blues was an American original that Europeans, I felt, could only imitate. At the same time, it occurred to me that there were loads of American singers who could precisely mimic the vocal delivery of Aretha Franklin and sound “soulful”, without having any genuine feelings to express. Perhaps “soul” is a language, I pondered, in which Americans are better speakers than Europeans, but also better liars. At least I could tell this band really meant it.
But these quibbles didn’t prevent me from staying till their last song, an extended version of “In the Midnight Hour.” The band vamped on the song’s two-chord progression for several minutes, steadily increasing the musical energy, as the singer repeated the phrase “in the midnight hour,” then just “midnight.” This buildup mirrored the crowd’s frenzied anticipation of Reunification midnight, which was still about three hours away.
After watching another rock band at Alexanderplatz for a little while, I walked further up the street and crossed a bridge over the Spree river. The bridge caused a bottleneck in the pedestrian traffic, and the crowd was extra thick on either side. As a result, I almost didn’t notice the river itself; the narrow Spree was just a thin crack running through the mass of people.
Just on the other side, where the stream of celebrants emptied out into another public square, there was a breathtaking view. Above the square, the Zeughaus, the German historical museum, was lit up in colored floodlights: the main dome blue, the surrounding spires green. I sat down on a grassy area just up from the riverbank. The Spree, now that I finally got a glimpse of it, sparkled under all the lights.
Midnight was nearing; time was starting to be a consideration. I had a lengthy straightway, the final march up Unter den Linden, towards Brandenburg Gate. There were now enough breaks in the people that I was able to walk fairly quickly. I noticed a laser beam above me, extending roughly parallel to the boulevard. It originated from Humboldt University, a passerby told me, and it pointed towards Brandenburg Gate. At midnight, it was to connect with a beam shone from the Technical University in West Berlin. Of course, I thought, this is Germany! The techies would naturally want to put on as flamboyant a display of east-west unity as everyone else.
The boulevard widened once again, into the square surrounding Brandenburg Gate. The closer I got to the Gate, the thicker the crowds were. It was now only a few minutes until twelve; excitement was building. People all around me were waving flags – some the West German flag, with the double eagle coat of arms, a few the East German flag, with the hammer-and-compass symbol of Socialist industry, many just the three colors – black, red, and gold. Fifty feet or so from Brandenburg Gate, I stopped; it was too difficult to push my way through people. I decided it was time to stand, quite still and solitary, and watch the world roll in ecstasy at my feet.
Apparently, people’s watches were synchronized. With about a half minute left in the history of the divided Germany, the ambient noise began to amplify. And then – at midnight – roars of jubilation. For about fifteen seconds, it literally rained champagne. In their limited space in the thickness of the crowd, people danced in the street, drank, hugged, and smashed their empty champagne bottles on the ground in celebration. Soon, broken glass was all over the pavement of the square. Kristallnacht.
As I had had quite a bit to drink myself, I became worried that in all the revelry, I would slip on an unbroken bottle and land face first on broken bottles. Surprisingly, I didn’t see any glass-related accidents that night.
Utter joy and utter mayhem. A trio of husky, gloriously drunk young men emerged from under Brandenburg Gate singing “Deutchland, Deutschland Über Alles.” This image of renewed German nationalism caused my stomach to tense up just a bit.
I walked to Brandenburg Gate, finally. There I was, right there, fifteen minutes into the new Germany. I decided to cross to the other side of the Gate, to see what it was like in what had until a few minutes ago been known as West Berlin. That was a big mistake. On the east side, there had been room to walk; on the west there was literally no space between people. I very soon felt myself being crushed from all sides, unable to move on my own volition but being carried away from the Gate by this human tide; carried towards the very center of this hell. Suddenly I was physically, viscerally afraid. At the same time I was desperately glad to be tall – barely tall enough among these big Germans, though. I didn’t know how the shorter people in the crowd could stand it. For about fifteen minutes I budged forcefully; first towards a seemingly less dense area of the crowd, which didn’t help, then towards Brandenburg Gate. Finally, I freed myself. I rejoined the party back at the east side of the gate, my brief, intense fright over.
Spotlights shone on people everywhere. They were bright enough that I was able to take pictures without a tripod, by bracing one side of the camera against something solid (like Brandenburg Gate) and setting the shutter to 1/15 of a second. Most of the pictures I took this way turned out clear. In this bright, brilliant midnight, I looked for potential photographs that would convey not only the frenzy but also the sheer immensity of the crowds. I saw a climbable tree near the Gate that looked like it would give me a high enough vantage point to get a few hundred thousand celebrants into the frame of my picture. From a branch about ten feet up, I beheld a view to the east – two miles of unbroken people stretching back down Unter den Linden; and to the west – the thick masses, glaringly spotlit, under the Reichstag, the traditional German parliament building until the war. That nobody else was already in this tree pleased me and amazed me somewhat; I felt tranquil for the first time in hours. I stayed there awhile, savoring the brief solitude this island of vertical space gave me.
From high up I could see that the multitudes formed not a solid wall of humanity, but more like a labyrinth of several walls. There was a path, an escape route, leading southward. I descended the tree and followed it. In a swath of empty land where the Berlin Wall had stood, and where a wall of Germans had probably stood earlier in the evening, I finally found some large open spaces, and a spectacle as well. In the middle of a circle of onlookers keeping a safe distance away, an extracted section of the Wall, lushly graffiti-decorated, had been propped up. Fifty feet above it a car, with an East German flag draped over it, hung from a crane. From below, they were shooting a fireworks mortar at the car. Each time the mortar did some damage to either the flag or the car, the crowd cheered. It was becoming clearer to me that this was as much a celebration of the end of East Germany as it was of the reunion of the two Germanys.
I wondered what they were going to do with the car. Drop it on the section of wall? Would that be safe with all these people around? They just continued firing at it. After awhile, I left.
I had no problem finding people to talk with among the revelers. I had a friendly chat with a young woman who had been studying dietetic science at an East German university. Now, with the end of socialist Germany Democratic Republic, her state scholarship was void, her degree program almost certainly terminated, and her future completely up in the air. This party, to her, was a last bash before things get tough.
Everyone was in a celebratory mood that night, but for many very different reasons. Some wore buttons proclaiming the reason of their celebration: Wir sind ein Volk – we are one people. Some were celebrating the demise of the East German state, others commiserating about it. A West German man I met a few days later in Cologne told me he had joined his countrymen in the drunken Reunification festivities, but for him it was a last blowout before the West Germany took over and raped East Germany and, newly huge and powerful, started bullying NATO and the European Economic Community around.
I went back to Brandenburg Gate. Just on the west side, which was now finally walkable, there was a group gathered around get another sight: a young man climbing Brandenburg Gate. He was shimmying up between two columns three feet apart, with a wall to brace himself against behind the columns. His friend was standing on a small four-foot high platform below him, spotting him in case he fell, it appeared, although what he would have done from his little perch to catch him, I had no idea. Each step the climber took was harder for me to watch. He had no ropes, and several times his sneaker slipped as he attempted the next foothold. The last part of the climb involved a three foot vertical surface, smoother and more foothold-free than the columns, with a platform jutting out a foot above it. I was sure he would tumble. But he managed a hold on the top platform, then hoisted himself upon it, stood up, and waved the German flag triumphantly to the cheering onlookers. I got two quick photographs, blurry but genuine, of the final ascent and the flag-waving from the summit. I left after that; I didn’t want to even glance at the climb down. I continued northwestward, toward the spotlights. They were blinding; it was like the end of an arena rock concert where the stage lights are turned on the audience so they can cheer themselves. Soon I was at the side of the Reichstag, with crowds thickening again. In front of the building, shiny, expensive, official-looking cars were parked diagonally, exposed to all the accidental abuse of the inebriated celebrants who were squeezing by them, carrying their spillable drinks. Occasionally, someone would actually tried to drive one of the cars through. I hoped the driver didn’t have to be anyplace soon.
Eventually, I pushed my way to the lawn in front of the Reichstag. Below me, visible through breaks in the crowd, was a garden, mercilessly trampled. I thought of the crushing crowds I’d been trapped in, and envisioned what it must have been like here at midnight, right in front of the traditional capitol building of all Germany.
It was about two in the morning, and the people were anxiously awaiting a speech by Helmut Kohl, the president of all of Germany now. “Hel-moot! Hel-moot!” they chanted. I waited for ten minutes, then decided that even if I did stay for Kohl’s speech, I wouldn’t understand it anyway except for a few German 101 verb conjugations. So, back to Brandenburg Gate.
I came to the clearing south of the Gate, where the hanging car had been. There were no spectators around that I saw, but the section of wall was still up. I crossed to the other side of it, and there was a crowd after all, though smaller than before. They were gathered around the car, which was on the ground, burning. It was mostly consumed by then, smoldering more than blazing, and the people around it were mostly silent. The fire cast an eerie light on the wall and its graffiti. Pieces of the car would fall off, and a young man in a leather jacket would kick the pieces back into the fire. It seemed vaguely barbaric – though I wasn’t sure why; it was only a car that nobody wanted.
Months later, I found out the significance of the spectacle. The car was a Trabant; an East German-made car, as I had assumed. The Trabant had a reputation as the worst car in Europe. And, being also the most visible of all the substandard products put out by East German manufacturers, it was the very embodiment of the failure of their socialist system. Thirty years of scientific economic planning produced a plastic-bodied, two-stoke engined car which, as one writer observed, crumpled up like Reynolds Wrap when you kicked it. Now, as part of the festivities, the people got a chance to see the Trabant, and East Germany symbolically, trashed.
I headed back down Unter den Linden, the same way I had come. A brass quintet, in tuxedos, played a baroque piece on a street corner. I stopped to listen. Their final piece of the evening was an arrangement of the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.” I couldn’t think of a more pleasant outdoor entertainment on the street at two-thirty in the morning.
The celebration was far from winding down, but I was starting to. As I walked back toward Alexanderplatz, I heard delightful background music. From Germany’s finest audio technology, a public address system that would have rivaled the most expensive home stereo systems I’d ever heard, came Mendelsohn’s violin concerto. To be treated to this while walking down the street, instead of Muzak, I felt blessed. The Germans could be riotous in their parties – especially this one, probably the biggest German party ever – but they could also be very civilized. In my sleepy state, I appreciated that. I found Alexanderplatz station, boarded the U-bahn, and headed back to Elberfelderstrasse.
The next day I joined the Germans in a day of complete leisure. Only half a day for me, actually, since it was about one in the afternoon when I got out of bed, and I didn’t leave the flat until close to four. In between those times I played guitar, took a shower, played more guitar, looked around, put on some clothes, and walked to the kitchen. Frau Foth offered to make me a mid-afternoon breakfast of toast, rolls, sausage, and a hard-boiled egg. How luxurious! I hadn’t asked her to fix me breakfast, nor was breakfast part of the home-stay deal, but she did, at three in the afternoon yet. I felt undeserving of such indulgence, especially after sleeping in so late in the day.
After breakfast, I ambled out of the apartment. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, though the shadows were starting to get long by then. Walking down cobblestoned Elberfelderstrasse, I felt totally carefree compared to the sense of urgency of the night before; not that I’d had any actual commitments then. Most Berliners had the day off, so I expected the whole city would be as free and easy as I. I took the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz.
Berlin, I decided, was my favorite city of the trip so far. After Paris, whose careful preservation of culture, history, and attitude had begun to somewhat weigh me down, Berlin – rebuilt following the war, unpretentious and free, somewhat crass like an American city – was a breath of fresh air. Yet I was noticing a pattern: almost every major city I visited was, at the time, my favorite so far. It wasn’t that the cities themselves got steadily better (otherwise how could Berlin be my favorite twice, with Paris in between?). Rather, each one had an aspect the previous one hadn’t, an aspect which seemed the fulfillment of all my journeying, until it lost its novelty. Beijing was my first foreign city, and what a foreign city it was. Then Irkutsk: finally, a Western foreign city, exotic but smogless, and in a woodsy Oregonian setting! Moscow: finally, a majestic national capitol, and a European city! Leningrad: finally, a real European city, with the gorgeous imperial 18th century architecture I’d only seen in books! Berlin, the first time: finally, back to the land of consumer stuff that had been denied me for two and a half weeks! Paris: finally, a home – both the house in Champigny, and the evocative, inviting streets of the city. And back to Berlin: finally, a place to feel free, rather than self-conscious as in self-conscious Paris.
There was some sort of political rally going on at the edge of Alexanderplatz. I was informed by a bystander that it was an anti-Nazi demonstration. It startled me that there would be a perceived need for such a demonstration. But if there were still Nazis in Germany, I reasoned, I was certainly glad that somebody was demonstrating against them. I was rather naive then; German politics and political viewpoints were vastly more volatile than I realized – especially in Berlin, especially during the Reunification. I saw police, equipped with white helmets, guns, and plexiglass shields, hurrying to and from the demonstration.
The rest of the square was peaceful and festive, though. Like the night before, there were beer and sausage booths set up. One stand was selling Kulmbacher – one of my all-time favorite imported beers back home, here sold by the plastic cup under an umbrella! Cruelly, the keg ran out as I was halfway through the line. I didn’t find any more Kulmbacher while I was in Germany; I would have to wait until I got home to Oregon.
I though about what I might want to do with my free time: do more sightseeing, get a real meal somewhere, and maybe, just out of curiosity, check out the sex shows I’d seen advertised on large, loud posters around Charlottenburg. I decided to take the U-bahn to the Charlottenburg district. However, I caught the wrong connection at the Zoo station and found myself heading into an unfamiliar residential area. I got off the train, and before catching the train in the other direction, I got a 6:00 lunch at one of the many nearby Turkish delicatessens.
Back at the platform in the U-bahn station, I noticed a young, disheveled-looking woman in a minidress, furtively looking around. I asked if I could help her. She told me in faltering, drunken English that she was trying to figure out how to get back to Charlottenburg – and also trying to elude a man who was following her. I turned around, and there he was, lurking on the periphery.
I told her which line she, and I, needed to take. My answer didn’t sound right to her, though. I insisted it was; as the sober member of us two, I wanted to make sure she was clear on how to get to her destination. But I was getting the impression she just wanted to go anywhere, and lose the man. So I asked her who this man was that was following her.
“Oh, just . . . a man . . .” she said, trailing off. I decided not to pursue that line of inquiry further. Out of equal parts gallantry and adventurousness, I offered to ride with her. She gave me a clumsy hug of gratitude, which confirmed my willingness to be her combination protector, boyfriend surrogate, and private eye. Off I was on the latest of the day’s adventures on the mean streets of Berlin.
The train arrived, and she and I took seats at the end of the nearest car. The mystery man boarded the same car and sat down at the other end. I kept an erect posture and a serious expression.
We approached the Zoo station, and I told her our connection was there. I got out of the train; she got out with me. And the man got out. We walked out of the station, down the street a couple of blocks, past some buildings, and past a hedge bordering the Zoologischer Garten. There were several places, especially near the hedge, where we were temporarily out of sight of the man, and she could have eluded him, but she kept walking. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to keep him in her sight or stay in his sight. She seemed less interested in getting away from the man, in fact, than I was. So, fine, I thought; I’ve fulfilled my gentlemanly obligation. I was starting to feel on borrowed time by then; perhaps I was getting into a situation too troublesome for Detective Dietrich to handle.
A little later, she let the man catch up to her. At that point, I excused myself, explained that I had to get back to my hotel, and walked off.
I was on the neon-lit main commercial strip of central West Berlin, Kurfürstendammstrasse, which hurried Berliners simply call Ku’damm. The bright lights welcomed me back, seeming like a reward for extracting myself from the previous situation. I passed some tables outside a bar, where a group of Americans were talking about Portland, Oregon, of all places. Here in Berlin, I figured, that’s as good an excuse as any to join in their conversation.
“Did I hear someone say the word Portland?” I offered.
“Yeah!” said the tall, full-voiced one in the party. “Hey – didn’t you go to Wilson High School?”
Oh, my gosh . . . Yes, he did look familiar. I took a closer look – Charles Keller, Class of ‘81 drama jock. (Wilson was unusual among high schools in that its drama students were regarded as an elite clique, rather than artsy outcasts.) “Charles?”
“Yes. I can’t quite remember your name, though . . .”
“Dietrich Neuman. I was in the orchestra.” In the school’s spring musical productions, I’d played viola, helping supply the lush accompaniment to his roles in “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Sound of Music.”
His surprise at running into me was short-lived, though, as he was in the middle of talking up two blonde American college girls. After introduced me to his brother Richard, he got back to them: “So, how long are you in town for? . . . Say, my brother and I are staying at such-and-such hotel . . . We can meet you there tomorrow. Not a problem!”
He was fond of that phrase, I noticed, judging by his frequent use of it. Not “no problem” – that was trite by 1990 – but “not a problem.” I waited awhile for him to get back to me concerning what an amazing meeting this is, and about what we’d been doing for the past decade. I had certainly done a lot worth talking about in the past month. But he continued chatting with the ladies, sprinkling his patter with not-a-problems. I got the uncomfortable feeling that regarded me the same as he did in high school, when, despite the many common friends he and I had in the music and drama departments, he was Mr. Big and I was a shy nobody. So I talked to his brother instead. Richard and I, in fact, had a very enjoyable conversation about our respective travels. Then I got up and discreetly walked off without excusing myself.
I went to a nearby kiosk and looked at magazines for a few minutes. But I wanted to give the reunion one more shot. Rather than defer to his social superiority of nine years previous, or snub him for seeming to force me to defer, I wanted to simply talk with him as an equal, and satisfy my curiosity of what he had been up to all these years.
I returned and made my presence known. We had a short discussion about the events of Reunification night, and our about mutual friends. “You remember Kim Cook?” I asked.
“Kim – red hair, kind of heavy-set?” How polite, Chuck.
“Yeah. I’ve been keeping in touch with her. I’ve seen Holly Burton a few times lately, too,” I said, referring to Kim’s friend and Charles’ high school sweetheart.
“Holly! How is she doing?”
“She’s doing great. She got married last summer . . .”
“She got married! Holly Burton got married! Aaaarrgh!! We’re getting old!!” he cried overdramatically, with a comic flourish – not for my benefit, certainly not for Holly’s, but obviously for the benefit of the two girls. One of them put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. Yes, Charles, we’re getting old.
I finally asked him what he does these days: “I’m a real-estate agent. I’m living in Phoenix, Arizona.”
Charles and Richard had to rush to catch a train, so our conversation was cut short. I said good-bye to Charles, and told Richard and the girls it was nice meeting them. They hurried off; I sauntered off with a smirk. Not a problem.
Ku’damm was also home to several of the erotic cabarets I’d seen advertised. I found a small strip parlor and walked in. A man at the counter told me that for five Deutschemarks (about $3.20), I could watch a stripper in a darkened room for five minutes. That was not much more than what I’d pay a Portland stripper in tips, so I paid. I was then directed to a tiny, circular room with five narrow chairs, four already occupied, that surrounded a glass-enclosed stage. They closed the door and dimmed the lights. I felt like I was about to be launched in a space capsule. A young, blonde, disinterested-looking woman in her underwear walked onto the stage. She danced unexpressively, stripping naked in the course of three minutes. The show was essentially no different than in Portland, but the lead-up was at least more interesting.
I walked out of the place just as a group of drunk Brits were walking by. One of them, a heavy-set, balding man in his 30’s, took notice of me. In the comically contemptuous voice of a British television comedian – John Cleese, perhaps – he commented to his friends: “And now, look at him.” And to me: “What are you doing here?”
“Here in Berlin, or here at the strip joint?”
“Here at the strip joint, what do you think? What are you doing in there?”
“Oh, just checking the place out, checking out strip joints in Berlin.”
“Well, are you a pervert, then?”
“Not according to my definition.”
I was taking his mistreatment like a trouper, which must have pleased him, since he invited me to walk with them with them to a bar. His name was Casey; and during the five minute walk, he and I got to know each other better as he heaped more cheerful abuse on me.
The bar appeared to be a cross between a German public house and an American sports bar. It was comfortable, clean, and, for a European drinking establishment, modern. Casey introduced his friends, all apparently in their thirties: Fiona, a slight blonde woman; her husband Mike; her dark, attractive friend Joanna; a couple from Wales, and a Berlin man who had shown us to this establishment. All but the Berliner and the Welsh couple were from Liverpool. Already I had a hankering to travel to Britain, where I imagined I could step into any pub and immediately find a cluster of new friends and have lively, opinionated conversation with them, exactly as was happening here.
Casey grilled me with questions about President Bush’s foreign policy – the imperialistic, heavy-handed, destructive actions of “the world’s policeman” – and how I, as an American, could explain and answer for it. It wasn’t the first time in this trip I’d found myself in this conversational situation. I described things as I saw them but reminded Casey that I was just one man living in America, I hadn’t voted for Bush, and, for the purposes of his conversation, I probably wasn’t the most perfect representative of my country. Maybe Europeans were more used to meeting Americans like Jeff on the Trans-Siberian. At any rate, Casey seemed more interested in giving his own opinions than hearing mine. “Gott in Himmel,” I muttered, exasperated.
“Im Himmel! Gott immm Himmel!”, Joanna fiercely corrected, suddenly turning from her private discussion with the Welsh couple. “It’s short for ‘Gott in dem Himmel’!” She rattled off more crisp, fiery German, then turned back around and resumed her previous conversation, occasionally returning to our discussion to register a strong opinion on American or European politics.
Fiona, who between Casey’s tirades and Joanna’s storms had been asking me polite questions out of general interest, introduced me to an English pub game. It didn’t have a formal name, but they called it “blow and suck.” The first person takes a beer coaster, puts it to his pursed lips, and holds it against his mouth by no other means than sucking. Then, not using his hands, he passes it to the mouth of the next person, who then must suck it into place and pass it to the next person the same way. The person who finally drops the coaster has to take a drink. Of course, like most drinking games, the point is not so much mastery of coaster placement, but the amusing and embarrassing things that occur as more beer is drunk, especially when someone drops the coaster and touches lips with the next person.
Unfortunately, we had only three people playing most of the time – Fiona, Mike, and me – so we couldn’t have the strict boy-girl-boy-girl arrangement that gives the game its adolescent appeal. In fact, I dropped the coaster a couple times while passing it to Mike. By then, we had drunk enough that it wasn’t too mortifying, and we took the inevitable jokes in stride. I could have done without scraping my lips on Mike’s thick stubble, though.
Soon after that, our German host left. Casey noted how he had avoided leaving any money on the table. “I’ll give you some advice, Dietrich,” he told me: “don’t be the last one to leave here tonight. Always duck out early. Because the last one to leave gets stuck with the tab. You can drink all you want, but as long as you get out early, it’s all free. Got that?”
We soon met the patrons at the next table. They were all from the Soviet Union: Aleksandr, Vitaly, Yuri, and Sasha; and George from the republic of Georgia. George gave us each a souvenir ten-ruble note stamped with his professional seal, lettered in English: “Consultant, the Georgian SSR Chamber of Commerce and Industry.”
Aleksandr was the only one who spoke conversational English with any fluency, which made him our focus of conversation. He was also the youngest (twentyish) and handsomest, which made him Joanna’s favorite. When someone had the idea of taking souvenir group portraits, Joanna snuggled smoothly up to him at the end of the table. Casey, taking a picture, sneered, “Okay, you two – swap spit!” They obliged, performing a lingering French kiss for the camera. Fiona looked on with mild distaste.
I asked Casey and Mike to squeeze in next to them so I could get a picture of the whole group. “I’ve got a simple rule,” Casey told me. “You take my picture, and I’ll smash your face in.” Mike pleaded his modesty the same way. Okay, I thought – we’re a bit camera-shy; that’s all right.
We decided to hit another night spot while the evening was still young; it was only about one or two in the morning. Casey and Mike decided to go back to the hotel, and the Welsh couple were long gone, so it was just Fiona, Joanna, me and the Soviets when we left the bar. Joanna encouraged the Soviets to stay with us, although she looked like she could do without Aleksandr’s friends. Drunk and emboldened by her command of Aleksandr’s attentions, she chirped to them: “Go! Go on! Can’t you see your friend and I are busy? Just leave!” and shooed them away like pesky children. They wandered sheepishly a short distance away.
We hailed two cabs, and Joanna, Aleksandr, Fiona and I got in one, Aleksandr’s friends in the second. Joanna directed the driver to one of her favorite Berlin nightclubs. When we got there, the doorman told us that it was now a members-only club. Joanna, enraged, snapped that she and Fiona had been regular customers before they instituted this stupid policy, and she wasn’t about to get turned away like some riffraff. But she was about to; the doorman wasn’t backing down. We hailed another pair of cabs and went to another favorite club of Fiona and Joanna’s, but it was closed for the night.
So, we stood on the street corner – Aleksandr’s friends looking bored and aimless, Joanna and Aleksandr flaunting their growing mutual desire, Fiona irritated at her friend’s behavior and telling me so, and me just wondering where we were going next if anyplace. I also wondered about Joanna; was she this bold, predatory, and dramatic usually? The whole drama – Joanna’s quick, even impatient, way with Aleksandr, the femme fatale role she was playing, Fiona’s mixture of disgust and concern for her friend – made me curious. Was this an extramarital fling I was seeing developing?
Fiona and I were a few feet separated from the rest of the group, so I asked her: “I know it’s none of my business, Fiona, but I’m just curious – Joanna, is she... Is she married?”
Instead of answering my question, Fiona snapped, “Well, I’ve had just about enough of the crap from Joanna.” She stalked over to her friend, gave her a piece of her mind, and stalked off in a huff. Joanna stood up to her, though, and went back to carrying on with Aleksandr.
Fiona only make it half a block before coming back; apparently her speech and abrupt exit hadn’t had the desired effect. She snapped at Joanna one more time and, thoroughly disgusted, stalked off again, this time for good.
It looked like the party was over. I had no one to talk to; Aleksandr and Joanna were ignoring everyone, and the other Soviet men were talking in Russian among themselves. It didn’t look like we’d be visiting any more night spots, and I had a slight desire to start the next day before too late in the afternoon, so I made my exit. This was another group of people I didn’t see again during the trip, and presumably would never see again; but, after meeting them, traveling alone didn’t seem to have quite so many drawbacks. I caught the U-bahn, got off at the stop closest to Elberfelderstrasse, then walked down the empty, dark streets the rest of the way home in sublime early morning solitude.
Thursday started very similarly to Wednesday: getting up in mid-afternoon, showering, loitering, eating breakfast Frau Foth cooked me. But this was my last day at her apartment. I packed my backpack, bid Elisabeth Foth a grateful farewell, and walked up Elberfelderstrasse for the last time.
I planned to go to Prague either that afternoon or the next morning, so I headed first to the Czech embassy. It was in eastern Berlin, in a prettier and less forbidding-looking Communist embassy compound than the one in Beijing. But it was closed when I got there, due to my late start, my confusion with U-bahn lines and street addresses, and the embassy’s not unexpected strange hours. But, I reasoned, no one I’d traveled with had been denied entry to a country because they didn’t have the Mongolian and Polish visas I’d paid so much to get in advance. So my lack of a visa shouldn’t stop me this time. I headed to Alexanderplatz, which was nearby.
Walking along a pedestrian-only street leading to the square, I started noticing police in riot gear again. It was another demonstration, a woman told me; this one in protest of the Reunification itself. The protesters were from Kreuzberg, a very poor neighborhood in western Berlin. This was the same group – young, mostly unemployed, and very leftist – that staged demonstrations every May Day.
Suddenly, I saw a woman who looked like she’d be one of the protesters – twentyish, in colorful but ragged hippie garb – running down the path past me. Then two more who looked similar, running. At that point I felt an urge to blink; something was irritating my eyes. Shortly thereafter, they started to water. Then, a sharp stinging sensation. I didn’t know what was happening, but I decided I’d better start running the same direction those kids were running. I did; so did most people nearby. Several hundred feet away, where the air was clear again, it was confirmed: that was tear gas; my first tear gas experience. I talked with another man who told me these weren’t oppressed folks organizing for social justice, these were just some antisocial, destructive hooligans. In such a politically charged city, the truth wasn’t always easy to find.
Dusk was approaching by now; it was getting too late in the day to leave Berlin and get to Prague at an hour when I could be assured of checking into a hostel. So my options were either to take a night train to Prague, or stay in Berlin one more night and go the next day. I wasn’t keen on taking another night train. Sure, I would gain time and save money, but I would miss a lot of scenery and, more importantly, miss a sense the continuity from one city to the next. So: one more night in Berlin, I concluded. Where in Berlin, I wasn’t sure. I would have felt awkward going back to Frau Foth’s and begging another night, even though she probably would be more than willing to accommodate me. However, things had died down since Reunification night, so there would probably be hostel rooms available – I hoped.
I took the U-Bahn to the Zoo station. The lobby wasn’t much less crowded than when I’d arrived in Berlin, and the lines to the phones were as long as they’d ever been. Plus, backpackers were dozing in their sleeping bags along the walls – this wasn’t reassuring. I also remembered how long it had taken before to wait in line at the phones, get the phone to accept my coins, and get through to even one of the hostels listed in Let’s Go.
There was a large group of American backpackers against one wall. I decided to talk to one at the end of the group and see if he had any suggestions for hostels. Not much, he said; Berlin was still awfully crowded for the Reunification, and rooms were very scarce. We got to talking about the past days’ events, and a few minutes into the conversation I mentioned I was headed for Prague.
“You’re going to Prague?” came a voice from nearby. The whole group against the wall, it turned out, was waiting for the night train to Prague, and they asked me if I wanted to join them. Thinking out loud, I explained that I had planned to wait until the morning and take the day train . . . No, they said, come with us.
It didn’t take much convincing. This was my destiny as an American backpacker in Europe – I had just found my companions for the next set of adventures awaiting me. “Okay,” I said.
And they saw my guitar. One asked if I played it; I said yes; another asked if I would play it, and I brought it out and sang a couple songs.
Eventually, we went to the train platform. The group seemed to be more or less led by two distinctive members. Distinctive because they were Australian instead of American and because, although they were about the same age as the rest of us, they seemed more seasoned travelers. The one who stood out most prominently was named Angus. He wore a black wool trench coat and well-worn Doc Marten boots, from which the back third of his right sole had come unattached and flapped like a trapdoor as he walked. Young, dark-featured, quiet-voiced but cocky, and vaguely rogue-like, he seemed a natural leader of scruffy vagabonds like us – our own Artful Dodger.
His companion was Walter, a Chinese Australian. Walter was witty and clownish, as self-assured as Angus but not averse to endearing, engaging goofiness. The combination of his unmistakably Chinese features and his thick, nasal Australian accent was comical in itself to me, and it seemed that someone growing up with those two qualities couldn’t help but become a comedian – but perhaps that was only from my American point of view.
The train arrived. There were about fifteen of us, so we split into groups to find cabins. I placed myself in Walter and Angus’ group, which included two American college women, Stephanie from Brooklyn and Jill from Rhode Island.
We asked a conductor which cars contained the sleeper cabins. All sleeper cabins were full, he told us. Apparently the crowds hadn’t thinned out after reunification as much as I had thought. We were placed in a standard seating car, eight seats for the five of us. Since they were bucket-type seats rather than benches, and uncushioned at that, I wondered how we would possibly sleep. But I didn’t wonder long: as soon as we were seated someone brought out a bottle of red wine and asked me to get out my guitar. Sleeping could wait; it was party time now.
After I played a few songs, my little black book was discovered. The little black book that I carried around in my guitar case contained handwritten lyrics of popular songs that I knew on guitar, but hadn’t memorized the lyrics of. I got more song requests from the book that evening than at probably any other sing-along I’d done. Apparently its song selection, heavy on Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash songs, matched everyone’s taste in music exactly. Which was too bad for me – I’d grown tired of a lot of those songs simply because they were constantly requested whenever I brought out the book. But I didn’t mind; I loved the attention and enjoyed being the showman. I would get three or four song requests before I was even finished playing a very abbreviated version of one song. And the wine tasted great under the circumstances.
At one point there was a series of requests that unexpectedly diverged from the standard repertoire I was used to getting requests for at sing-alongs. Stephanie asked me to play Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” on guitar. She and Jill sang it heartily as if they were born knowing the song, and afterwards, in response to their requests, I played about every Billy Joel song I knew. I was used to singing with people who seemed to know Neil Young’s whole body of work, but not Billy Joel’s. Stephanie told me that the pianist from Long Island had always had a more devoted following on the east coast than in the west. And indeed, later in the trip, I would be playing “Piano Man” and other Billy Joel tunes quite frequently with people from the eastern United States.
But the most desired song that evening was “American Pie” – it was, in fact the single most requested song of my whole trip. Each time I met up with a group of American backpackers in Europe, I could predict that one of them would ask me to play the song, and most or all would sing along when I played it. And each time I played it, I could tell why it was so popular. Twenty years after it was recorded, the song still captivated young adults, especially young, temporarily self-exiled Americans, with its panorama of images and its longing for a lost America. And playing the song – all eight minutes, all seven verses – was a ritual. The act of performing this long liturgy of rock ‘n’ roll mythology, and challenging everyone to remember all or most of the words in correct order (especially those who couldn’t read the tiny handwriting in my black book over my shoulder), was a true bonding event.
Angus rolled and lit a cigarette, despite the prominent “No Smoking” sign in the cabin. He explained that it was one of those little rules that they stick up signs for everywhere, which, if you’re reasonably discreet, you can just ignore. I wanted to mention to him that there are very good reasons for little rules like this one: to avoid irritating people like me, to give one example. But the window was open, so the smoke didn’t bother me too much, and yes, I was afraid of alienating my new friend, so I timidly endured it.
More songs and more wine – we were starting to feel like old friends. Stephanie talked about growing up in Brooklyn, going to college in upstate New York, and making a conscious (and successful) decision to lose her Brooklyn accent. Eventually we all started to tire out.
The moment we’d all been trying to postpone, bedtime, when we would attempt to sleep, finally arrived. We knew that sleeping would be much more difficult and uncomfortable than partying, but we couldn’t party any longer. Our satisfied mood soon changed. Each of us slumped halfway on and halfway off the seats diagonally, trying to assume something of a sleepable position without crowding the next person’s space too much.
The wind from the open window was making the cabin cold, so someone closed it. Soon, the heat from the heater made the place swelteringly hot. We tried to turn it down, but the thermostat dial wouldn’t budge. A conductor came by a bit later; he couldn’t adjust the thermostat either. So we cracked the window a bit to try and even out the temperature. But the window wouldn’t stay in place – as the train bobbed gently up and down on the tracks, so did the window. It ended up hovering about halfway down, so we quickly got cold again. This, I decided, was positively the stupidest train car I’d ever been on – the heating system wasn’t adjustable, and our cooling system adjusted itself. We ended up making do by switching from too hot to too cold every few minutes.
In a little while, the train slowed down, the brakes shrieked loudly, and the train came to an abrupt stop. It was merely a scheduled stop at a dismal looking East German station. A few dozen passengers boarded. Then the train started up again, squealing as it lurched violently forward.
We heard people milling about in the aisle outside our cabin. A few minutes later, they were still milling. A couple of them peered into our cabin, looking at the five of us in an eight-seat cabin. There was nothing bad in their appearance, but to me – not wanting to give up what little comfort I had to people with no comfort at all – they looked like dirty refugees. I think we all had that same feeling. “Well, if they wanted to come in, they’d knock on the door,” one of us lamely rationalized aloud.
In retrospect, it seems an fitting image while leaving Germany after its celebration of reunion: I, a westerner, trying to ignore the covetous gazes of the distinctly less privileged easterners, but all riding the same train – their train, actually. I lay half-awake until daybreak, coming close enough to sleep to put the both the physical wretchedness and the guilt out of my mind.