The Berlin Crossing Read Online Free PDF

eyes were closed, her dry lips moving, as she prayed on the other side of my mother’s grave. Frau Mertens looked
     at peace, as though she had found her place in life.
    I wondered, idly, while the priest droned on, about my mother’s place, in death. Her mother, my grandmother, had not survived
     the war; her father had died in the last frantic days onthe Baltic Coast, as the German army tried, in vain, to escape the rampaging Soviet forces. My mother had been raised in an
     orphanage in Chemnitz (renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt in the GDR but now once again known by its old name in our brave new world);
     after school she had been sent to work in a printing works before being assigned to a similar job in Brandenburg. And then
     there was me, and the flat on the fourth floor, and the closed-doors life we lived together. And now my mother had her patch
     of ground on the bank of the Havel, and the low stone that, in good time, like a dutiful German son, I would raise over her:
Petra Ritter, 1943–1993
.
    My mother had lived for fifty years and what I knew about her could be written in a handful of words and a couple of dates.
     A chill wind gusted in across the river and I looked from the grave to Steffi, slim and lovely in the navy, knee-length suit,
     and I knew my own loss: there was no one to fight with, now, and anyway the war itself had been lost . . .
    Even the streets of Brandenburg seemed lost to me. Only bread and beer, the merest basics, brought me into the shops; otherwise
     I shunned the town, as though I might be picked up by the agents of the new invaders. Once, stepping out of the supermarket,
     my loaf and
wurst
under my arm, I almost collided with a couple of my old students, and I grunted a kind of greeting as I hurried away from
     their smiles, their hellos, the question in their fresh teenage faces. They reminded me too much of what I had no wish to
     remember.
    So I snapped open the cans of beer, drank the cool liquid and tasted nothing. Sat at the open window of the flat and neither
     saw nor heard the passing trains. Pulled the Trabi in on the dirt road beside the lake and opened another beer. The white
     swans glided by on the rippling waters; the fading grasses stirred in the November wind. When Frau Mertens asked, on the stairsthat evening, if I’d had a nice drive, I struggled to remember where I’d been.
    I caught the look she gave me, saw the concern in her eyes. The moment passed, as we stood facing each other on the stone
     steps. Don’t ask, I thought, and she didn’t. It was the way we lived, the way we had survived. Frau Mertens understood, even
     if my mother had always seemed uncomfortable with the way you had to respect one another’s space.
    Frau Mertens had always accorded me a certain deference. Especially when I was appointed to the town’s Education Committee,
     soon after I’d joined the staff of Gymnasium No.1. Maybe she guessed that, as an up-and-coming young member of the Party,
     I’d be given sight of letters from my fourth-floor neighbour in our apartment block. Her deference had been unnecessary: what
     did I care about the neighbour overhead who was forever listening in to the American station, AFN? Why should I give a damn
     about the fellow on the ground floor who played rock music on his record player until after midnight? Besides, her prying,
     spying eyes notwithstanding, I had never disliked Frau Mertens.
    Now she wanted to know if I’d like her to clear out my mother’s wardrobe.
    ‘It’s been over a month now, Michi.’
    ‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and thank you.’
    ‘I won’t disturb anything personal.’
    ‘Do as you wish with the stuff. If there’s anything you like—’
    She blushed; I thought I might have offended her.
    ‘I’m really grateful to you, Frau Mertens. I hope you can find something to keep as a memento, that’s what I meant.’
    She thanked me, continued downstairs with her two sacks of rubbish.
    What could she possibly find of value in