The Berlin Crossing Read Online Free PDF Page B

my mother’s things
? Oldclothes, cheap shoes. Jewellery of glass and paste and plastic. A few paperback books. A handful of photos in a cardboard
     box with dark red roses on the lid. Nothing much to mark a life lived.
    And a few words coughed on her deathbed.
    Your father. Pastor Bruck. Bad Saarow
.
    I realized, shutting the door of the flat behind me, that, ever since my mother’s death, I had been trying to lock these words
     out of my mind. These words that belonged in the darkness, in the narrow pit where my mother lay. Across the river, beyond
     the town. Not here in this fourth-floor flat, where no father had ever walked, had ever breathed. Or had ever been breathed
     of.
    Now some spectre ghosted from the grave by the river and padded with silent steps across the water, across the sleepers and
     tracks of the railway, and insinuated himself into the fourth-floor flat. Into my mind. Into my life.
    Well, he could just spirit himself back to wherever he had come from. And he could go fuck himself along the way.
    For the umpteenth night in a row I couldn’t sleep. About three in the morning I called Directory Enquiries, the great new
     we-never-sleep service that had reached out to us across no-man’s-land as part of our new and wonderful reunified country.
     The voice said, we can’t help, there’s no listing for that name.
    At eight o’clock I was behind the wheel of my old Trabi, polluting the atmosphere, coughing my way past the winter trees and
     the naked fields to Bad Saarow.

Four
    Bad Saarow. A T-junction south-east of Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Polish border. The Romans had settled here, lured
     by the spa, the thermal spring that gave the place its name. In the Weimar days, after the shame of Versailles, artists and
     writers and film-makers had clustered here: the thermal waters soothed them, the light was good, the great lake was a place
     to swim and frolic and dream. The Nazis had replaced them: nightmares roamed where dreams had blossomed.
    Bad Saarow: a place without a centre, a crisscross of roads between the lake and the woods, around the railway station and
     the spa baths. I had been there once, during my years at the university in Rostock. When Dieter had invited me to spend the
     weekend at his family’s place, halfway through our third year in college, I’d been nervous: I’d never been to the home of
     a senior Party official – a senior officer in economic and strategic planning at the ministry in Berlin. Groundless fears:
     Dieter’s parents had put me completely at ease in the weekend villa on the lakeshore, had encouraged me to come again to enjoy
     the lake, the launch; their home was always open, they said, to any friend of Dieter’s.
    I pulled in at the wooden kiosk near the railway station. The small hatch was surrounded by magazines and newspapers, the
     new glories of tits and football, the staple fare of
Bild
and
Express
and the rest of the ‘free press’ from the moralizing West. I watched the steam from my coffee swirl in the November morning
     above the high metal table on the pavement and wondered what Dieter’s father would make of our new homeland, the new Bad Saarow.
     I’d lost touch; Dieter had left after graduation to join his parents in Damascus, where his father was by then heading up
     a new development unit in the Syrian capital.
    There would be no place for him in the new Bad Saarow. Dieter’s family was just one more casualty of the fall of the Wall;
     unremembered statistics, not even blips on the graphs and tables of our new prosperity. Like the shiny new tiled front on
     the station; like the huge noticeboard which announced that work would shortly begin on the redevelopment of the spa – whirlpools
     and swirlpools, water slides and water rides, all the glories of the new dawn that would bring Berliners by the trainload
     to this quiet backwater where I was supposed to be searching for a Pastor Bruck.
    No, the fellow in the kiosk didn’t