The Cold War: Unreasonably Good Times In East Berlin

With a slight push on the heavy steel door, the five of us come in from the cold. The small building is the size of two tractor trailers, and constructed from pockmarked wartime concrete. It is almost invisible against the wide white landscape of snow and crooked winter trees. The floors, which were once painted a rusty blood red, have been chipped away by the passage of hundreds, or thousands of tourist feet. We huddle for a moment before continuing; the German winter sun is setting at 4:00PM, and outside the temperature has dropped to -10ºC. With another nudge, Nikola opens a second door to our left, into the small museum the Germans have erected around the remains of the Orianneburg concentration camp prisoner’s kitchen.

On the main floor, small windowboxes hang at eye level, protected by centimetre-thick glass and lit impassively from below. Each includes a name, an enlarged black-and-white photo, and a simple story of persecution. Here is Max Ernst, a camp escapee from Poland. Here is Rosa Limburg, who smuggled medicine from army barracks to concentration camp prisoners. Here is Daniel Schauzberg, who was forced to help the camp doctor when he prepared lampshades for his personal study. He writes that he threw up when he found a tattoo on a pelt: he realized the lampshades were being cut from the dead skins of camp prisoners.

His picture, and many of the others, bear wide and unconvincing smiles. The years of torture, rape, abuse, starvation, and assault the Nazis inflicted on these people has left around their eyes the lines of an old man. At the bottom of a staircase, we come upon a long flat display case, full of leather scraps. The caption reads: “At the ‘shoe-factory,’ camp workers disassembled the leather shoes and luggage of concentration camp prisoners, after execution at Dachau. New prisoners were issued wooden clogs. On the scrap above, an address in Vienna is still visible.” Another passageway opens into a new display room, where stories of grief and horror lay beneath plate glass. A staircase at the back of the exhibit drops into the frigid basement. The floor here is unprotected, and I descend alone. An empty cold-room holds fifty-or-so thick iron hooks, hanging from the ceiling to hold sides of meat. In the the next room, a concrete depression the size of a washtub is marked by a simple sign: this was the sink for a camp of thousands. Any prisoner attempting to wash a potato, or any food, before it was cooked was beaten and held under the putrid dish water.

On every wall, and many of the colossal concrete columns of the basement, the prisoners left paintings. Water droplets with tubby legs and cartoony smiles leap from deep porcelain tubs; carrots with googly eyes dance with onion women at a festival; a small display of painted flowers has faded with time, mostly because food dyes were never meant to be used as paint by prisoner cooks. They are scenes of happiness, of being fat and unwrinkled, of groups and dancing and mythic feasts. And there, alone in the basement of the Orianneburg concentration camp kitchen, I felt as though I should cry; not because the camp was a tragedy, which it was, but because people had left paintings in this kitchen. Starved and beaten and hated by mad-dog guards, these people had painted anything but their grim camp-lives.

*

Whatever you have heard about Germany is wonderfully, eerily true. The people of Berlin are built tall and thick, and are remarkably blond. The language is full of English-sounding barks, coughs, and mouth-rounding “U” noises. They seem to be unaware that they all sound like B-movie Germans, and insist on saying things like “Brunsbetter Franklewurster” without laughing.

At the end of four days in Berlin, it’s obvious that four days aren’t nearly enough to grok Germany. Winter fairs have sprouted in the main squares that make us laugh with pleasure, and uncomprehending delight. Booths sell absurdly long sausage, and hot spiced wine, and bear-fur balaclavas. Small drinking halls have been erected next to fountains. The closest thing to fruit in Berlin is probably the sauerkraut. Children are ice-skating in front of the Reichstag. Beer is as cheap and hearty as bread; if your nose isn’t cherry red from the frigid river winds, then your cheeks are rosy from being gently drunk. The Germans are ruthless in their hospitality and efficiency. Lines form automatically. Although there is every reason to get in out of the cold, there is no jaywalking. None.

A much mocked sign marks one edge of the old Berlin Wall, at the border of the old wartime American zone. If you have seen it, on t-shirts or in dorm rooms, you may understand a little of German humor. Though the old sign was stolen in the fever of re-unification when the Wall fell, the Germans have reconstructed it, and mounted the replica about where the wall fell. It reads:

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.
please obey all traffic rules.

It’s All Greek to Me: Rome in Three Days

I winced slightly as the bottle fell from my hand, clattering noisily across the slick, dark cobblestone steps. The sound rang out in long reports across the wet spread of St. Peter’s Square, an oval plaza big enough to hold several hundred thousand people. Less than a dozen citizens strolled around its center, damp foreheads frosted in the light from a towering Christmas fir in the center of the square. A police car hunkered menacingly across the oval from us four, its two headlights blazing twin golden arches across the plaza cobbles. As the beer bottle clattered to the stony floor of the square, I jerk my head up to meet that hot yellow stare; the unnerving impression of an almond-eyed predator watching us from a cave, made more dramatic by the fact that the Vatican is towering, dark and windswept, just meters behind the police car’s bumper.

Two ringing peals later, I had my hand on the neck of the beer, and had spun it behind my heel, out of sight. We are, in a time-honored Spanish tradition, botellón-ing the Vatican. A bag to the left has tidily swallowed the empties. I am sure this sort of public drinking must be illegal in America -- and regardless, it feels tremendously dangerous to wield your bottle-opener in the Vatican. We toast to the Pope’s good health, by nodding the tapered glass necks towards the hotly glowing windows of the pontiff’s balcony, and shiver in the frigid river wind that whips across Rome from the east.


*

We followed the winter winds around the Eternal City for three days: seven hills, four men, and thousands of years of history, caked on everything the eye could reach. The palm-sized, square slate cobbles run in crazed, angular capillaries between main thoroughfares, broad avenues choked by top-heavy Vespae, hammerhead SmartCars, and the bleating blitz of the Italian police force. The men are all a head shorter than our crew, and seem to favor their hair flipped backwards, and brushed to a glossy finish. Dark, knee-length wool coats are buttoned over suit-and-tie, or the strong, simple lines of a scarf. The gleam of buckled loafers ambles lazily in and out of their shadows; the Italian is not a rushed man, life will come at the same pace it always has. The women have zipped their legs into long leather contraptions, so that from knee to toe they are pure cappuccino calf-skin. In my red skiing shell, I look mostly like a stranded Swede.

Our warpath down the avenida was planned using the free, cartoonish map from the hostel. It includes helpful hints on how to respond to Rome’s monuments: toss a coin at the Trevi fountain (two if you seek love); look for the sun motif in the Pantheon (it’s under the crosses); climb to the top of the Coliseum to take in the arresting power of the arena (“are you now entertained!?”). Many were the times when I wished that the map would include other useful information (how do you say, “cheap,” in Italian?), but did not mind so much that I went off in search of the Italian answer. Nobody (but nobody!) in our group speaks any Italian, though we make a good show of gesticulating, and pronouncing our Spanish like the name of a pasta.

Later Tuesday, on the summit of Palatine Hill, wandering among the ruins of the Roman Emperor’s most magnificent palace, we ran into another set of Stanford-in-Madrid students. After quoting (and misquoting) our tourguides on the debauched origins of Rome, we slipped away to take in the rest. From the cap of the hill, which is crowned with the skeletons of the tallest arches of Rome, we could see across to the mournfully teetering half of the Colosseum. At the foot of the hill between the two giants of architecture, a double-wide road (Via Sagra) traces the spine of what was once the world’s greatest market. A thin cord separates the Via tourist’s footsteps from the graveyards of ancient Roman business; on the desolate field to either side hip-high marble columns have fallen everywhere, the intricate capstones nearly faded with time and neglect. A few walls still stand, reluctantly, gaptoothed and senile-looking, their brick covered with mossy verdigris. Grass springs up fitfully, as though it knows it shouldn’t reclaim the Forum; what was once the financial heart of a world is being slowly reclaimed, absorbed into a mossy hill.


*

The new, larger group has decided not to drink at the Sistine Chapel again, in favor of more traditional scenery. A dinner at Caffé Carbonara is one of the NYTimes’ favorites -- under the front awning, the restaurant frames its copy of the article that awarded it “best pasta in Rome.” It was certainly fresh: my spaghetti carbonara almost bit back, it was so new. A few glasses of red Tuscan wine convinced us we might like some gelato to close out the night’s eating, so we moved on to the NYTimes “number one” gelato location, a thin bar called San Nicolo’s that boasted unusually delicious flavors like Honey, Lemongrass, and Forest. We find a bar in Campo de Fiore, and say some long, well-liquored goodbyes. Though we hug goodbye, and mean it, our faces are full of a stronger, shared emotion: home is calling. And though these friends are heading off to the States, the rest of us are making one last red-eyed tour of Europe. Scarves are left hanging over bed-rails that night; we hear Berlin may bring our first snow of the season.

Go Bing Or Go Home: thoughts from a long quarter away

I feel as though I should say something, as the waiter whisks away the dessert plates. Dessert has finished, I say to myself, in Spanish: <ya se ha acabado el postre> Such a simple tug, and the program’s last dinner has ended; if I want to, for the first time in three months, I might say something in English. Nervous and clammy, I hastily excuse myself (perdona) and walk stiffly to the bathroom.

I make a small ritual of washing my hands, just to give myself time to really swallow the moment. “You’ve earned it,” I’m thinking. “Just let the rest go.” I’m almost surprised by the resistance I’m getting, as I walk through the motions of English in my head. For a long, long time, I put a viciously sharp end to any English thought, and the sensation feels forbidden, taboo, and something like cheating.

We depart by Metro, soon to meet up and head out one last time, on the famous Madrid party circuit. As the cars trundle mildly under the city, an entire car full of Americans is gushing English, vowels twanging off the steel walls and arching their backs under the long, fluorescent lights. Gische and I are talking about the trip we’ll be taking afterward, and sudden, almost-unwanted freedom of leaving Madrid. As is our custom, he speaks in English, I respond in Spanish; it is very comfortable this way. And then James says, in response to something I have said: “Yeah, it’s been a long night.” And as easily if I meant to do it all along, as if my mind knew before I did, the last little brick in a once-tall wall toppled over. “It’s been a long three months,” I respond, watching the last of a steely damping wall slide past the slowing railcar. I do not know if he sees the long shiver that runs across my back, or the hot rush of blood across my face. It is done. The Americans have arrived, and I pick up what is left of my papers and join them. We leave the station in a large, ungainly pack.

*

If you and I, friend and reader, have a moment sometime, we might talk about what the Madrid program taught us all. To be sure, each of the forty students left Madrid with a heavy helping of Spanish, of Iberian culture, and the chafing uncertainty of being alone in broad, foreign city for months. Many of us cried when we hugged our host-moms goodbye: for me, Maria Luisa Basail Larrañaga was everything; she taught me thousands of words, how to cook patatas bravas, and shared her family with an open heart. Leaving her was harder than leaving Stanford.

I will not return, I think, unchanged. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the language ban was the complete death of your social life (which sounds melodramatic, but is surprisingly true). For three months, I did not make jokes: you simply don’t have the tools to make them. No wordplay: you don’t have the vocabulary. No comebacks: you’re still not fast enough. And if you’re planning on going out tonight, and you aren’t packing English, you’re more of an involved bystander than a party-goer.

In the beginning it was difficult, but it isn’t any longer. I spent many more hours reading than talking; Atlas Shrugged, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Five Smooth Stones, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Freddy and Frederika, Ringworld, and many more besides. These authors were the only English I allowed myself, and I clung to them like a drowning man. Solitude became passable, even agreeable. The Spanish meal schedule was the norm; the family became everything; the language took life. It was exactly what I asked for, when I applied in March, now that I think back, exactly what enraptured me at the end of that long and indolent summer at Stanford. If I thought it would be a pleasure, then I was a fool.

As I write this, my plane to Rome leaves in three hours. I must close the lid and weigh my bags one last time, trying like a mad man to fit my life into twenty kilos. I can hear Señora opening the lock on the apartment door, which means that she’s come home from shopping to see me off safely. There is a word in Spanish for this feeling, of being special and cherished, but lonely and singular. It is word that wraps up these three months well, in three syllables.

The word is <único.>