Martin’s hair, when she had last seen him, was thick and wavy and sandy brown. Had he brushed it downward instead of curling the ends behind his ears, it would have reached halfway to his shoulders. Now, however, it was cut close to the scalp and shockingly blond. A bigger surprise still was his face, once obscured by a thin, wispy beard and now smooth-shaven. How round and open it was. He looked slightly stuffed and padded, though he did not seem to have gained weight in his body.
Martin lived in a second-floor flat of what had once been a grand mansion—now subdivided and rented to negligent students—near the Grunewald train station in the British sector of West Berlin. An old wrought-iron gate gave way to a shabby, untended garden. Various entrances to the separate apartments had been knocked through the outer walls, giving the entire structure the look of a large mouth missing teeth in several crucial places. The apartment was tiny, but the high ceiling and a verandah, which afforded views of leafy, healthy old trees in the garden, gave Vivi a sense of space that the room did not.
In the first days following her arrival in Berlin Martin took time from work and university to show her the city, introduce her to friends. Berlin seemed to be filled with students; in some neighborhoods nobody appeared to be older than twenty-five. Many, like Martin, had come to West Berlin from other parts of Germany for its special status as an occupied city, meaning that Berlin residents were not required to serve in the German army. He brought Vivi to the local greengrocer, to the bank, to the post office. He invited her to all the popular hangouts: Die Ruine, Café Einstein, Terzo Mondo, and especially to Zweiblfisch, an easy train ride away, where the intellectuals debated anything and everything all night, to dawn. Vivi clung to Martin, awed and fearful, worried how she would manage on her own when Martin returned to his schedule. He taught her words she would need to know and was generally solicitous and quite glad to have her with him. They made love often, though at Vivi’s insistence it was usually in the dark.
Before leaving Israel Vivi had had trouble picturing her life in Berlin, what she would spend her days doing, but had been generally excited to be in Europe, with so much culture and history lying around like a field studded with precious gems waiting to be collected. What she had not counted on, however, was the isolation of Berlin, a city—not even a city but a half city—that was a geographical dead-end, a cul-de-sac. Whereas in Israel she had sometimes felt hemmed in by troubled borders too close for comfort, here in Berlin she felt absolutely threatened, and had frequent nightmares in which she was constantly, accidentally, stepping across the border into East Germany and getting shot or beaten or imprisoned.
As a foreigner with no official status, Vivi was forbidden from working or studying, so after a month of settling in to Martin’s routines, after recovering from her initial shock and fear, she began to explore Berlin. She walked the Tiergarten, the Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, the Zoologischer Garten, the Fritz-Schloss Park. She walked the grand boulevards and the small side streets. She visited the museums, the churches, the concert halls. She spent one whole week in the newly remodeled KaDeWe department store, a day on each floor testing perfumes, sampling cheeses, watching television broadcasts in the electronics section. Even halved it was a huge city, but she walked Berlin tirelessly, in ever-expanding concentric circles. On sunny days she prowled the parks and on rainy ones the museums or the shops. Mostly, on these long days of rambling energy, she spoke to no one, other than a quick request for coffee in a café or a ticket at a museum. Sometimes, however, she was approached, usually by men. They talked of the weather or commented on her brisk walk, all the while a smile on their rosy-cheeked faces. But their eyes would always drop downward, stopping at her chest, her hips. She quickly learned to cut off these aimless conversations before their eyes could wander.
In the evenings she was eager for conversation, real human interaction, and wished to recount the events of her day to Martin. Martin, fatigued from medical studies and a day job in a hospital lab, wished for study time in the evenings, hoping to dispense with conversation over dinner. Vivi found this intolerable, and looked for ways to provoke his anger in order to coax him into talking to her.
“I spent the day in the portrait gallery of the National Museum today,” she told him. “All those pale inbred aristocrats. I thought they were so ugly. Then afterward, on the street outside, I kept running into them. They’re all over the place, haven’t changed a bit!”
Martin grinned but did not look up from his books.
Vivi made a great, noisy show of scraping and stacking the glass dishes. “Then I stopped back in KaDeWe for a pair of socks and wound up buying four sweaters and a new winter coat.”
“Hmmm,” he said absentmindedly.
“Then I had sex with the bear keeper and one of the bears at the Tiergarten Zoo.”
“Which did you prefer?” he asked, without looking up.
She threw a dishtowel at him.
“Martin,” she screamed. “I’m bored and miserable!”
Martin slipped a bookmark between the pages and closed his book. He stood, stretched and approached Vivi, taking her into his arms so that her cheek pressed against his chest. “I know, darling, I know. Tomorrow night I’ll take you out dancing, or to a film. Would you like to see a film?”
She listened to his voice as it reached her both from his mouth and from the deep rumble in his chest. She put her arms around his middle. “I miss you,” she said softly.
Despite the tremendous size of the city, even just her half, Vivi had exhausted the museums and parks of West Berlin in a matter of weeks. The weather turned cold; her lips chapped and her skin grew dry. Her concentric circles shrank and she stayed closer to home, but still she spent hours outside the house every day.
Vivi found herself drawn eastward, toward the wall and the city that lay beyond. Through November and December her outings always started off the same way, with a ride on the 129 bus to Potsdamer-strasse or Friedrichstrasse, both close to the wall. Some days she would walk the wall north, to where the Reichstag sat on the river, other days south and eastward through Kreuzberg, where once again she met the River Spree. Always, she kept to the wall for as long as she could before a biting wind or a freezing snowfall pushed her home. Often she would choose a spot and simply stare up at the wall, learning its structure, imagining scaling it, wondering if there were a Vivi standing just across from her on the other side contemplating all the same things. At night she was full of questions.
“When exactly was it built?” she would ask Martin, who was sprawled on the mattress reading a medical textbook.
“Neunzehnhunderteinundsechzig.” He could never come up with numbers quickly in any language but German and had long since abandoned Hebrew for English as their mode of communication.
Vivi paused to calculate. “Sheeshim v’echad. That’s 1961. So what was happening until then? I mean, from the end of the war, did people just move back and forth or what?”
“Aaarrghhh,” said Martin, slamming shut his textbook. Vivi was certain she had derailed him and he would be angry. “I hate studying all these diseases, I learn the symptoms and start to imagine I have them.” He stood up from the bed and yawned, then turned his attention to Vivi. “What were you asking me?”
“About the wall. About Berlin before the wall.”
“Ja, there were checkpoints and you needed an Interzonenpass to get around. It was far easier for Westerners to pass to the East than vice versa. The East Berliners wanted the exotic fruits we had in the markets, the women wanted seamless stockings. That’s why the Soviets built the wall.”
Vivi thought about the KaDeWe department store, how close and tantalizing it must have seemed to the Germans east of the wall, and yet how impossibly distant. Like a high window to a blue sky in a prison cell.
“The signs,” she said to Martin. “There are so many different signs and I’m always trying to understand them: ‘Verursacht durch die Schandsperre,’ ” she quoted.
“ ‘This now dead-end street,’ ” he translated, “ ‘is the result of the barrier of shame.’ ”
“Ah,” she said. “And, ‘Sektoren-Grenze in Gawässer Mitte,’ what does that one mean?”
Martin smiled. “That the border is in the middle of the lake or canal or river.”
“Oh yes,” she says, “I’ve seen buoys floating in the water marked GDR or FRG. It’s absurd!”
“It’s absurd, yes, but it’s the only logical solution for now.”
She had heard him debate this at length at Zweiblfisch many times and had no desire to hear his arguments again. She had more questions, she was bubbling over with questions about the wall, but Martin had crossed the room and was pulling her to him. He wrapped her inside himself, hugged her with heavy arms.
One morning well into January, as she stood gazing upward at a corner in the wall where Kommandantenstrasse met Springerstrasse, a tiny man appeared at her elbow from nowhere. “Fünfundvierzig tausend,” he said.
Vivi was too startled and too curious to be afraid. She knew he had said a number but she could not figure which one, nor what it had to do with anything.
“Forty-five thousand,” he repeated in English. “The wall is made up of forty-five thousand of these segments, each one 3.6 meters tall and 1.2 meters wide. They’ve been rebuilt and refurbished four times, most recently in 1975. It seems they’ll be here for a very long time.”
“What are they made of?” she asked, immediately at ease with this dwarf. In fact he looked quite powerful, in spite of his size, but she felt she could trust him.
“They’re concrete slabs between steel girders and concrete posts, with concrete sewage pipes on the top,” he said in precise, rehearsed English. “The new segments put up in the last few years are supposed to be more resistant than ever to breakthroughs.”
She sized him up, trying to guess his age. “Can you tell me what it was like before they built the wall?” she asked.
“Certainly,” he said quickly, “for a hot chocolate with whipped cream in the café over there.”
Vivi did not glance over her shoulder to where he was pointing. “Lead the way,” she said, “it’s a deal.”
Peter, he was called, or Hans-Peter if you insisted. He had been raised in Leipzig but had come to Berlin in the summer of 1961, when rumors of plans to seal off the West from the East were rife. He had tried to convince his aging mother to come with him but she insisted he go alone, and so he crossed quite undramatically into West Berlin and never saw her again. He told Vivi he had been twenty years old when he had crossed over, so she figured he was in his mid-forties by now.
“Lucky for me I wasn’t born any earlier than I was,” he said, a whipped cream mustache foaming on his upper lip, “or the Nazis would have experimented on me for sure.” He looked down into his cup and Vivi thought he might start to cry. There was a teaspoon next to his mug but Peter preferred stirring his cocoa with his finger and sucking off the cream and the chocolate. Vivi found him highly amusing, and safe, like a grown-up child.
“What is it like in the East?” she asked, taking a sip of her own hot chocolate.
“Well I don’t know anymore firsthand, of course, but I have a pretty good idea. Lots of parades and marches, power shortages, speeches. No good television—I love television!—no pineapples, no fancy clothes or sports cars. Lots of rationing.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if to inform her he had said all there was to say about East Germany. She waited for more but Peter was busy with the bun she had ordered.
With a mouthful of bread Peter said, “You walk a lot around here, along the wall, I’ve seen you. This area is my territory. Every once in a while someone manages to escape from the East into West Berlin and I am always hoping he’ll drop down the wall right in my sector. I’ve had a few, two actually, a chap from Berlin and another from a tiny village near Leipzig. He spoke the same dialect as me, even knew my mother’s little newsstand. He’s married now, living in Spandau.” Peter drained his mug and licked the chocolatey rim. “I can show you around the neighborhood if you like.”
Vivi paid and the two were out in the street. The sun had come out and suddenly the ice and snow shone brightly in the light, blinding her. Peter seemed unaffected.
That day he showed her one small street in his territory, one small street that she might have happened past a dozen times and never noticed, for it was unremarkable in every way: a short and narrow lane of insignificant buildings that dead-ended at the wall. But Peter brought the street alive for the entirety of its seven-hundred-year existence. He told of princes who had slept or dueled there, merchants who had prospered and failed, a patrician family who had used their roof garden for several suicide jumps stretched over three generations. He told of East Germans who had plunged from the wall to the street, a single bullet through the neck. And he told of Jews, Jews tortured or beaten or chased.
Vivi was riveted. She stayed with Peter in the street until she could no longer feel her fingers or toes. She met him the next day, and the next. She learned his likes and dislikes, and took pains to pack lunches he might enjoy, since she could not afford to invite him for hot chocolate and buns every day of the week.
Peter showed her the real Berlin and its ghost. He pointed out where the jazz clubs had flourished, where prostitutes and pimps had gathered. Together they stood at the site of Europe’s first traffic light, in Potsdamer Platz, or they trekked paths that pursued and frightened Berliners had used to stay clear of the marauding Soviets at the end of the war. Peter taught Vivi to see Berlin in layers, like a woman with countless rustling petticoats, each concealing secrets large and small. He was clearly both in love with and appalled by his adopted city.
This was the parallel Berlin she had sensed was still there, in the shadow of modern, cosmopolitan Berlin, the one she had felt haunted by from her first days in the city. The Berlin that coughed up Jews for the slaughter, the Berlin that harbored train stations to ship the unwanted to concentration camps, the Berlin that had been sectored off differently from the way it was now, between Jews and Aryans. But this parallel Berlin was visible only to those who searched her out with diligence.
Vivi stayed out longer and longer hours with Peter, often returning after dark, when Martin was already at home. “The dwarf again?” he asked when she blew in with the cold air late, later than he, for the third time that week. She was surprised to find him reading a newspaper instead of a textbook or medical journal. Something was bubbling on the stove.
“Peter, yes,” she said, removing her coat and hat and gloves and scarf, scattering them as she moved quickly around the room. “Today we went out to the prison at Spandau, where they’re keeping Rudolf Hess. Peter told me the whole inside story. Fascinating.”
“I’m so glad you’ve found both an occupation for yourself and a friend to share your days with,” he said with a sarcastic lilt, his voice growing louder as he spoke. “Why not bring this Peter home for a meal sometime?” He glanced over his newspaper to catch her reaction.
“I’d love to, but he won’t come,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. She had suggested dinner at their place on several occasions to Peter, but he changed the subject each time.
Vivi lifted the lid of the pot on the stove. Chili, the only dish Martin could make with constant success. “Martin, did you know that Hess is the only prisoner left in Spandau, in that whole huge complex?”
“Frankly no and I don’t care. Why are you so obsessed with all our ugliest characters, and that damned hideous wall? If I’d studied in Hamburg or Heidelberg, you could have become obsessed with window boxes or wooden chalets, but here it’s always Berlin at her worst, doom and gloom.” Vivi, leaning on the stove, could feel the chili steaming her back, a warm current rising up her spine to the nape of her neck. Martin rose and came close but did not touch her. He was waiting for an answer but she did not know what the question was.
On a Friday morning in February Vivi and Peter met in a pleasant square not far from the southwest corner of the wall. The sky was a dark and threatening gray, but the weather was a bit warmer than usual and there was no hint of a flurry or even a drop of rain. Vivi was wearing a new cloth coat she had bought with her dwindling savings, bright red and heavy and marvelously warm. She wore a small black knitted cap, her ears tucked inside. Peter wore his usual tiny blue parka.
“This is Rosengartenplatz,” he told her. “I’ve been saving it until you were ready.”
“Ready for what?” she asked.
“Ready to handle it.” She did not ask what he meant and he stared up into her face for a long moment before continuing.
“A long time ago, probably two hundred and fifty years or so, a Jewish family lived on the top floor of that building.” He was pointing to a narrow, well-preserved structure five stories high with a steep, tiled roof. “Burchardt was the name, he’d made his fortune in shipping on the Baltic and came to Berlin to set up a bank. He had a beautiful daughter, Mathilde, who studied piano and voice in that building over there, right across the piazza, with a German called Franz Huber. He raped her, that Franz Huber the music teacher, and she never set foot in his building again. She lay at home, despondent, and the family did not know what to do for her. There was no going to the authorities, this was still pre-Enlightenment Germany. Then, some months later, she was discovered to be with child. The despondency of this beautiful, talented young woman grew worse by the day so that a short while after giving birth, in fact in the first moment she was alone, she dragged herself to the window and threw herself into the street. And her father, agonizing over his daughter’s death and unable to tolerate this unwanted child, took the newborn baby and threw it over the wall of a small church that stood over there”—he pointed to an ugly postwar apartment building—“but which burned down some years later.
“A woman passing by spotted him and set up a cry, ‘Baby killers, the Jews are baby killers, they killed our Lord Jesus and now they need more blood!’ You know, all the usual. And in minutes an angry mob had gathered, and someone brought the dead baby from the church garden and then all mayhem broke out. The rest of the Burchardt family was dragged into the street and stoned and clubbed by the mob, until all of them—Burchardt and his wife, the wife’s sister, and their other two children—all lay dead. Then people simmered down and went home to their families, to a hot meal and a warm bed.” Peter was shaking his head. Vivi was numb, her breathing shallow; she felt herself to be on the edge of life, floating precariously.
“But that’s not all. During World War Two a Jewish family by the name of Simon lived in the same apartment. The father was a doctor, he had a clinic on the ground floor and he was known as a compassionate and generous man. He took impressive sums from his richer clients and used them to cover free treatment for the poor of the neighborhood, who knew they could always pay him a visit if they really needed to.
“Dr. Simon didn’t read the signs, or maybe it was his wife and mother-in-law who were certain no harm would come to them and preferred to ride out the Nazi storm. In any case, they stayed, through 1939 and 1940. They stayed through 1941, when they were made to wear the Star of David, and through 1942, when their home was marked as belonging to Jews. Then in June 1943, just before the very last Jews were deported from Berlin, Dr. Simon tried to arrange hiding places for his family with former patients of his. He approached this one and that, rich and poor, and not a one would help him. Maybe they were unfeeling or cruel, maybe they were just frightened of the consequences, I can’t tell you. But at night on the ninth of June, as Dr. Simon and his wife and mother-in-law sat down to dinner, the Gestapo pounded on the door. They ordered the doctor and his wife downstairs, into the street. When they were standing directly in front of their building a signal was given and the old mother-in-law was tossed headfirst from the window, landing precisely on her son-in-law and killing him. A Nazi shot Mrs. Simon in the neck just as she began to scream. The three bodies were carted away the next morning.”
The day ended quickly for Vivi. She staggered homeward as though she had been delivered a hard blow. The pavement seemed to hang on a tilt and she could not regain her bearings. Each footfall was treacherous, as if she were stepping on writhing body parts or pools of blood. She walked the wrong way and wound up in an unfamiliar neighborhood. A woman hanging laundry on the upper floor of a five-story walk-up seemed to be calling her. Vivi listened more closely.
Swine. Murderer. Anti-Christ. Was she hearing her correctly? Vermin. Blackmailer. Jew. Was she really raining down these words on her, pelting Vivi with verbal rocks? She began to run, turning away from the laundry woman at the first corner, and knocked down an elderly man with glasses. She stopped to help him up, apologizing and gathering his groceries. The old man said nothing while Vivi blabbed as best she could in German. Jew? she thought she heard him ask quietly. Vivi ran until the streets looked familiar. Here was the greengrocer, and there the man who sold her newspapers. She began to run again, afraid she might hear words she could not bear to hear from them. She burst into a shop just around the corner from home, bought some supplies and headed home.
Two hours later, when Martin came home from the university, he found his apartment transformed. The lights were dimmed and two tall candles glimmered at the center of the makeshift table. The table was set for two, as elegantly as Vivi had been able to muster, and several pots and pans sat simmering on the stove. Vivi stood stooped in a corner of the room, her back to Martin. She was swaying and mumbling.
Martin said nothing, but crept up behind her. In her hands he could see a prayer book. He stood to her side and for several minutes watched her pray the Sabbath prayers, her eyes closed to him and all the world. The words were a constant hum, indecipherable one from the other, but melodious. Finally Martin turned and went to wash up, splashing warm water on his face and neck.
At dinner he tried to be sympathetic, ask about her day, thank her for the lovely Sabbath meal. She was dispassionate. She looked at him like a stranger who had wandered in uninvited from the street, though they both knew the reality was that she, in fact, was the guest. After dinner she picked a fight.
“Am I here because of your guilt?” she asked him, two plates balanced midair.
“What guilt is that?” he asked, guilelessly.
“Germans and Jews, Germans and Jews, centuries of Germans and Jews.” She was mumbling, but Martin could hear every word.
“I thought perhaps you meant last Passover. Jail.”
Vivi stopped mumbling. “That’ll do, too. Are you guilty? Do you feel bad that I am dead to my family, that I ran away from them for you? That my commanding officer thought I’d betrayed my country for you?” Martin backed away as though he feared she might hurl the plates if she got any more worked up. Were those flames dancing in Vivi’s eyes, or merely a reflection of the candles?
“I thought we had something special, Vivi,” he said, weighing his words carefully, “something that transcended our peoples and our histories. But this city’s done something to you. The memories, the history, they’re too much for you.”
She cocked her head and stared into his eyes until he looked away.
Quietly she put the dishes in the sink and slipped into her red coat. Martin did not say a word. She left the warm flat and wandered the streets for hours singing Sabbath songs to herself, mumbling prayers, reciting psalms. She walked in circles and reached the wall several times without intending to. She passed a busy beer garden where dozens of red-faced men sat noisily drinking. They called to her, they dared reach their hairy paws toward her, she who was deep inside the Sabbath behind a shimmering veil. They did not know she was untouchable, protected. Liebchen, they called. Baby, they crooned. She sang her Sabbath melodies louder, warmed herself in their fire.
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning when she returned to the flat. Martin was sleeping soundly when she lay down next to him on the mattress, next to him but apart. She thought about his hands, his shoulders, his uncircumcised penis and turned her back to him.
At precisely seven o’clock, before the sun had risen, a blackbird landed on the windowsill and Vivi snapped awake with the cold and certain knowledge that a baby was growing inside her.
That day she had no desire to walk. Her head was clear, her legs were tired, and she was afraid of the cold. But she did not wish to stay at home with Martin.
He would be on duty at the hospital that afternoon and the next, he told her, but offered to make them a big brunch in the morning. They ate eggs and toast and potatoes and read the newspaper. Martin did not ask when Vivi had returned. He was relieved to find her subdued but sane.
By Sunday, Vivi had her answers, knew her plan. Later that morning, when Martin had settled in for some studying before leaving for the hospital, Vivi left home and walked three blocks to a large cinema. She spent the afternoon and most of the evening watching one film after the next: martial arts and Westerns and science fiction and adventure movies, until her eyes glazed and her head pounded. When she was thoroughly exhausted she took herself home, walking in a roundabout way just to clear her head. She lay silently in bed feigning sleep by the time Martin straggled in smelling of beer and cigarettes.
On Monday morning Vivi was waiting at the Lufthansa office when it opened. She bought a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv for Friday before dawn. Next she found Peter. “I need your help,” she told him. Together they boarded a train and headed for a clinic in Zehlendorf. She lied when asked about having been tested. By afternoon her relief was so great that she would have floated all the way home had she not been weak and in pain. Peter helped her home, got her settled in bed and departed silently before Martin returned.
Vivi convalesced quickly, her mind running ahead to the packing—which would be little more than cramming all her belongings into any suitcase available—and to when and how she would tell Martin she was leaving. But no moment presented itself that week and so, with a taxi waiting downstairs, Vivi awakened Martin very late on Thursday, in the small hours that had in fact pushed the day to Friday, and, buttoned into her red coat, suitcase in hand, she said a hasty good-bye. Martin did not even stand from the bed as she left the flat, but she did see him step out shirtless into the cold night air on the verandah as the driver hurried her away.
It was an hour and a half before Sabbath by the time she passed through Israeli customs. Vivi reckoned the taxi would put her at her parents’ doorstep just as her mother was lighting the Sabbath candles. It would take her mother and father more than a few days to forgive her, but she had no doubt they would be enormously, deeply relieved to have her home.