Karen peered out of the window, her curiosity piqued by the uncharacteristically shrill edge in Grunger’s tone. The physical effects of the Second World War, from what she had seen on the journey, had been tidied away, the devastated cities patched up and made whole again. Germany’s battered people, she presumed, must have longed for quiet after the onslaught they had lived through, and then, sixteen years after the war’s end, the Soviets had taken the sectors of the country they were given to manage in 1945 and cut them away. Now, there were two Germanys, split by a 900-mile-long border: the Federal Republic in the West and the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which contained the still partly West-controlled city of Berlin, in the East. Karen knew that – she had studied that. Seeing its reality, however, was a different thing altogether.
There was nothing storybook about the border. Low windowless huts squatted between the traffic lanes like overweight guard dogs. Red and white barriers dissected the road, flagpoles muscled up on either side: stars and stripes and Union Jacks to mark out the West in one direction, the compass and hammer-stamped banners of the DDR floating a little higher over the East. There were towers. There were soldiers flinging orders. There were an awful lot of guns.
‘They’re getting on!’
Whoever squealed was quickly shushed.
The rifles slung across their backs as casually as fishing rods gave the two baggily uniformed boys an older man’s swagger. They didn’t make eye contact or smile, despite the giggles and blushes that greeted them.
By the time the coach was released, everybody’s mood had sharpened. Karen perched on her seat remembering her flippant words to her father: the war’s long over. She stared out of the window as the no-stops, heavily speed-restricted drive took them past barbed wire and watchtowers. Now she was in East Germany, staring into its blatantly military face, her father’s anguished response suddenly took on a new depth.
She wasn’t the only one to feel the change. One by one, the girls stopped chatting.
The exhale when the coach reached the checkpoint on the outskirts of Berlin was thick enough to be tangible. That crossing was a far quicker affair, the soldiers jauntily waving them through happily American.
‘We’ve sailed across the socialist sea, girls!’ The soldiers’ winks had turned Grunger giddy. ‘And reached the island of Berlin. A little piece of the West clinging on among the Reds.’
The coach rattled on; the city unfolded itself in a penned-in muddle that pinned Karen to the window. It was austere rather than pretty – stripped clean of the columns and arches she had expected.
‘Don’t worry – there are plenty of parks and far lovelier areas than what you see here.’
Karen wasn’t worried at all; she was fascinated. As they drew closer in, she could see that Berlin had its share of crumbling once-ornate buildings, but these were overshadowed by sleek-sided housing blocks lined up in rows like perfectly polished teeth.
‘It’s all a bit… clinical.’ The sniff that followed the sneering comment from the back of the bus echoed round the coach.
Denny smiled across the aisle at Karen. ‘Take no notice. Your classmates are being classical-loving snobs because they think that’s what they’re meant to be. This is a city reinventing itself – look with your cleverer eye and enjoy it.’
She pointed out an art gallery as she spoke that was all angles and edges and as unlike a home for old masters as Karen could ever imagine. Nothing in Berlin was what she had imagined. It was so different to anywhere she had seen before. Bits of the city were still broken, pocked with old bullet holes and filled with weed-choked bomb sites not filled in since the war. Bits of it were unashamedly modern. Apart from a huge battered belfry flanked by what looked like giant metal honeycombs, there was barely a church spire to be seen. What there was, pulling the eye like a magnet, was the Wall.
It snaked grey and brooding, a round-topped concrete punch twice the height of the people milling past it. It slashed through the city, blocking off streets, cutting across corners, appearing and reappearing as if its map had been drawn by a shaky-handed toddler. Twice, the coach driver took a wrong turning and it jumped out in front of them, dissecting a park, looming over a playground, bricked-up eyeless buildings clinging to its edges like scabs.
Karen was equally mesmerised and daunted by the Wall’s blankness, by its hand-in-the-air stop-here brutality.
On the first night, she gazed down from the dormitory window long after her companions had fallen asleep, drawn like a moth to the spotlights which marked out the Wall’s grip on the city. Neon blazed on one side; darkness swallowed up the other. Karen followed the outline as far as she could and realised Grunger was right: Berlin, or at least its western side, sat as isolated from the rest of West Germany as an ocean-edged island. Its brightness against the rolled-up-early eastern sector was too much. The lights made the city appear overdone, like it was trying too hard. It looked at once vulnerable and brash.
It looked like the kind of place that wouldn’t easily surrender its secrets.
It wasn’t until their third and final day that the girls proved themselves fit to be allowed to explore Berlin unsupervised.
By the time that decision was announced, Karen had started to concoct escape plans, convinced she would be trapped forever on the coach shuttling them from one ‘essential sight’ to the next. She had made herself dizzy twisting and turning, trying to read street signs, trying to guess which disappearing corner might lead to the city her mother had known. She couldn’t concentrate at the rickety Potsdamer Platz viewing point, although the Wall’s death strip and anti-tank traps and the rifle-wielding guards had the other girls excitedly pointing. She tried, but she couldn’t share the interest when the scrubby rise between the defences was revealed as Hitler’s buried bunker. The wasteland was too wide, the buildings visible in East Berlin too far away to feel like they had once inhabited the same city. What if part of her mother’s story was stuck over there? Karen climbed down from the platform far quicker than the others, feeling the Wall’s threat closing in on her, personal and real.
‘Go in pairs remember; watch out for each other!’
The girls burst from the coach like a dam exploding, all the teachers’ instructions on sticking together and taking care on the subway instantly forgotten.
Karen stuck tight to a group heading towards the Kurfürstendamm until Denny’s chirping panic floated away. The shopping street was packed. Crowds weaved round the display cabinets that dotted the pavements and the café tables that were full despite the crisp March air. Karen slowed down, loitering by a theatre as if attracted by its posters. Her classmates called out to her to hurry; she called back that she would. Within seconds, they were lost in the blur.
Shoppers swung round her, laden with bags. Waiters flew in and out of wide-windowed cafés five times the size of anything Aldershot could offer. The moment she had been counting down to had finally arrived, but Karen was rooted to the spot, overwhelmed by the size of her task and the pitiful amount of information she had gathered to help her. Giggling through the shopping centres and department stores and trying to sneak into a bar suddenly seemed endlessly attractive.
I need not to be me, the English girl abroad and out of her depth. I need to be somebody smarter.