Under The Lindens

Under the Lindens
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Otto Haak hobbled ahead with his walking stick, soaking in the mild summer sun. Above him the linden trees swayed gently in the breeze, playing hide and seek with the sun rays. He stopped for a while to gaze ahead. There it was, at the end of the vast boulevard of the Unter Den Linden, the Brandenburg gate, the trigger to a floodgate of memories. It was under the Brandenburg that the watch had started ticking again, the day the Berlin wall had come down and the world had changed forever.

Otto gripped his walking stick firmly and tapped the sidewalk a couple of times as if to make sure that it was still there and started walking again. His eyesight was not what it used to be and he was under a constant fear of losing his balance and falling. He stopped outside a smoky Kaffeeklatsch and peered inside. It was here that he liked to while away time with his friend Gunter. Otto found him sitting in the far corner reading a magazine.

“ It’s nice and sunny outside, Gunter,” Otto said lighting his pipe as he sat down at the corner table. “Wouldn’t you like to sit outside under the lindens?”

“ I like the cool darkness,” Gunter said flipping another page of the magazine. I can still read here and the darkness links me with the past. Those were the days, those heady days when we ruled the world, if even for a while. Now we belong to the EU. It’s not the same. The fatherland is obsolete and forgotten.”

Otto blew sparks from his pipe setting fire to imaginary things around him. “Do you remember Poland, Gunter?” As a young 24-year-old German officer in World War II, Otto had served in Poland during the German invasion and that’s where he had found Gunter. If it weren’t for him Gunter would have surely died. He had carried Gunter on his shoulders for three miles till he had reached the nearest German military facility.

Yes, Gunter remembered and he was more than grateful. How could he ever forget? It was just after Germany had invaded Poland that the war had begun; and life for him had nearly ended. A grenade had exploded in the trench where he was holed up and he had been left numb and dying. An unfamiliar face had appeared from out of nowhere to lift him up. He had seen a smoke filled sky, a dark apparition of trees and a river of liquid fire before passing into oblivion.

“ I still don’t understand why you’d risked your life and saved mine,” Gunter said to Otto as he sipped his cup of coffee. “ They called you a hero but I still think you were the greatest fool alive.”

“You would have done the same for me, I’m sure,” Otto chuckled blowing more sparks from his pipe. They’d had this conversation umpteen times in the past.

“No I wouldn’t have,” Gunter retorted playfully. “I’d have saved my own skin. But then, I’m not you and I wouldn’t have gone off to kill Hitler either. You have a conscience.”

“ Getting at Hitler was worth the risk of one man,” Otto laughed out loud screwing up his face and grimacing with phantom pain. Yes, he did have a conscience. Nazi Germany had made him face the conflict between conscience and duty to the state. It wasn’t really a choice, but he chose the former and entered into a conspiracy to kill Hitler. Recruited by Count Claus von Stauffenburg, he’d agreed to carry a bomb when showing Hitler a new issue of winter uniforms, an early attempt at suicide bombing. But the vehicle transporting the uniforms was attacked and destroyed by Allied aircraft. The uniforms never arrived and the assassination attempt was called off.

“ You were a bloody fool but I was lucky to have you around,” said Gunter. He had given Otto the only material possession that he had at the time, a beautiful gold watch that he had stolen from a dead Polish commander. Behind the watch, Gunter had used his knife and etched the words ‘To Otto the Fool – Gunter’. The watch had stopped ticking in the madness of the battlefield but it was so beautiful and intricately designed that he hadn’t been able to resist it. Gunter had never told Otto that it was a stolen watch. “Do you still have the watch Otto? Gunter asked. Memories of the watch always took him to the battle on the Polish front. “May I see it?”

“ It’s a strange watch,” Otto said as he brought it out of the inner pocket of his jacket. “When you gave it to me in Poland, it wasn’t working. Then I got sent off to the Russian front and one day, suddenly, the watch started to tick again. I felt that there was a strange power that was protecting me, and somehow I was sure that it was from the watch. Don’t ask me how I knew. I just knew. I knew that as long as I had the watch as a talisman, nothing could touch or harm me. That is, as long as it kept ticking. Strangely, it stopped ticking the day we got the order for retreat."

Gunter took the watch in his hands and looked at it closely. It was a fine example of German craftsmanship. It had been made in Triburg, the clock capital of the Black Forest region of Baden Wuttenburg. The watchmakers of Triburg were making watches long before the Swiss from across the border learned the art. This was history in his hands. But every time he held the watch it reminded him that deep down, and in sharp contrast to his friend Otto, he was a coward and a thief. If the watch acted as spirit of protection for Otto, it was a mirror to all the insecurities that Gunter lived with hidden deep down in his psyche. He just couldn’t tell Otto that he’d stolen the watch. He was still a coward.

“It’s ticking now,” Gunter took the watch near his ears and did some synchronized ticking with his mouth. “When did it start ticking? According to your theory, life should be looking up for you.”

“ Surprisingly, it started ticking again the day the Berlin wall came down,” Otto said thinking back on the day the nation became one again. “I stood there together with the dust of the fallen wall swirling around my feet. Germans from the East and the West had raised their voices on that chilly November night. Sometimes it’s wise to shut it all out and listen only, just once more to those four words that made a nation whole. Wir sind ein volk. You weren’t there Gunter, but they repeated it and repeated it until it became a chant. We are one people…..we are one people……we are one people….and bliss was in that dawn."

“And, are we, are we one people?” Gunter asked. “The West Germans are reluctant to pay the bill for reunification and factories in the East have closed down. We were Germans first and foremost. A quirk of history made us East Germans. And now…” Gunter’s eyes glazed and he stared up at the darkness of the ceiling. It was as if the past troubles of Germany were playing out in his mind – the wars, the uncertainties, the insecurities that have stood like ushers to the country’s many weddings with history.

Otto and Gunter looked at each gently probing shared memory, which lay buried in the dark recesses of the mind. The guilt of yesteryears floated in front of them. They did not speak of it. No one did. They had to confront it even though it was a difficult task. They had a long word for this process of overcoming guilt feelings about the past. It was Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. It was a terrible burden. It was also why there was so little show of rampant nationalism after reunification.

“ You’re somewhat right Gunter,” Otto broke the silence. “ We now take pride in the place we come from, a citizen of Saxony or Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Baden Wuttenburg. Somehow, I can relate to that. But, do you think Karen and Axel can relate to that? Their world has been limited to the myopic vision of East Germany.”

“You’ve got good grandchildren Otto,” Gunter put his old shriveled hands on Otto’s. “They’re young. They might be a bit confused at the moment but they are resilient.” He remembered the night when their parents had been shot while trying to cross the wall to the west. Then, the responsibility of bringing them up had fallen squarely on Otto.

“I tried my best Gunter,” Otto replied, “but I think my best wasn’t good enough. They needed their parents. Perhaps I was too strict. I don’t know. Karen can look after herself; she’s always been independent, always ready to learn. But, it’s Axel I am worried about.”

Gunter straightened his feeble frame and with half smile lighting up his face, he raised his arm in a frail gesture of a mock salute of the Third Reich. “Heil Axel!” he said in his soft broken voice, “the kid reminds me of myself. He should have been a warrior for our fatherland. He needs something to fight against, some enemy even when it is imaginary.” Gunter had seen Axel grow up as a kid. He was the son he had never had and, at least, he was not a coward like himself. He had cleaned his bruises after street brawls, kept anger in control when he rebelled against his bosses at the state-controlled Pentacon factory which made the Praktica cameras. But then, the Treuhandanstalt, the government body charged with deciding the fate of companies in the East after reunification, shut down Pentacon, and Axel lost his job.

“He’s found an imaginary enemy all right,” Otto shook his head. “He hates the Gypsies, he hates the Poles, he hates the Vietnamese and the Turks. You can’t wish them away. They’ve been here in East Berlin forever and now the Russian Jews are coming in. He looks at the glitter of West Berlin’s Kurfurstendamn and the new glitzy American business center where Checkpoint Charlie used to be, and he sees red. He went looking for a job there and they told him that he wasn’t trained for it. The West Berliner’s made fun of his thick Berlinerisch accent. He now hates himself and he hates the world.”

“What do they say, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, isn’t it?” Gunter said as he caressed his cup of coffee. “It’ll take years before East and West Berliners overcome their prejudices. It’s not easy when two different worlds come suddenly together; die Mauer im Kopf – it’s the psychological barrier, the wall in the head. Under communism everybody had jobs, not efficient and productive, but it brought in the food and gave everyone a livelihood. What bothered Axel then was that he felt shut in and not able to speak his mind.”

“Now he’s speaking his mind all right,” Otto’s face hardened. “I saw him at a neo-Nazi demonstration wearing a Nazi insignia, issuing diatribes against aliens, communists and Jews. I am afraid he has become an active member of a violent gang. He frequently comes home drunk and bleeding. A month ago he had a stab wound. Karen takes care of him, poor girl. Where did I go wrong? Sometimes I feel that it is all spinning out of control.”

“It’s not your fault,” Gunter comforted him by placing his shriveled ancient hands over Otto’s. “There is little we can do. Take solace in Karen. A Humboldt University graduate in the family, huh? They’re spending more than a hundred billion euros on Berlin. It’s only a matter of time that it returns back to its vibrant cosmopolitan ways. Our little Karen will be there to see us through.”

“While we exorcise the demons of the past,” Otto added and smiled. “ Karen is already talking of joining a publishing business. She doesn’t think of herself as having loyalties to East or West Berlin. She’s the product of New Berlin. She lives in the present and the future. She’ll grab the opportunities that come her way. But unlike us, she’ll be a European first. The two old men sat there talking oblivious of the flow of time, reliving the past and coming to terms with the present. The sun had quietly gone down and the evening crowd had begun to fill up the Kaffeeklatsch. A cool breeze started blowing in from over the river Spree carrying the fragrance of the Tiergarten’s flowers. The Lindens danced in tune.

“It’s getting dark,” said Gunter. “Shouldn’t we be heading home?”

Otto sighed and took out the watch from his pocket. “Damn,” he said in mock horror, “the watch has stopped!”

“I guess is too old now, much older than us my friend,” Gunter smiled as he got up from his table and then winced as the old pain in his hip resurfaced. “You must have forgotten to rewind it. Otto, Otto my friend, get yourself a quartz watch and move with the times. This beauty is not reliable anymore.”

Gunter and Otto hobbled out of the coffee bar and started walking up the Unter Der Linden, tapping the sidewalk with their walking sticks as they went. It was a long walk to the Alexander Platz train station, but at their age, time wasn’t a constraint. They walked past the ivy-covered walls of the Humboldt University, past Museum Island on the Spree and leaving the imposing structure of the Berlin city hall on their right, walked toward the more plebeian part of former East Berlin. If the stones could talk, they would tell many a tale of the city of arts, the operas, the theaters and orchestras and the decadent excesses of the Weimar era. Leaving the grandeur of the Unter Der Linden, they headed toward the prefab structures of an era, which had different priorities. Günter and Otto had survived it all.

They entered the Alexander Platz U- Bahn subway station walking past leather clad techno heads, prostitutes leaning against gum-ball machines and street musicians playing the violin in the hope that passersby would drop a few euros into the hat on the floor. They made their way down one level into the U- Bahn platform and found themselves with a group of Turks waiting for the next train home.

Without warning, the pillars came alive with shaven heads and black leather jackets. “Knoblauchfresser! You friggin garlic eaters,” they screamed and charged at the Turks with iron chains and knives. A chain snaked through the air and caught a young Turk around his neck. Another cut his ear with a knife. Otto and Gunter were caught in the mayhem and instinctively tried to protect themselves with their walking sticks. Then the Turks fought back. They fought with bags and briefcases and their bare hands.

Otto couldn’t believe what he saw. Axel was slowly chocking a man to his death with a chain. He was definitely out of his senses acting like a madman. He gave a demonic scream as he squeezed. He had to be stopped. Otto felt the aches and burden of his age slip away. In front of him he saw the Polish battlefield and a new strength flowed into his veins.

“Stop, Otto,” Gunter shouted and tried to hold on to his friend.

Otto pushed through the crowd of brawling humanity and charged at Axel pushing him off the chocking man with his momentum.

“You stay out of this, crazy old man,” Axel screamed and tried to get back to the man he had attacked.

Otto picked himself up and charged again taking Axel with him as he went and slid over the platform and on to the train tracks. Neither of them saw the silhouette of the train approaching the station or heard its roar. Gunter bit his lip as the pain hit his hip, but he dropped to the floor and slid on to the tracks. He didn’t know where the strength was coming from. He was no longer hiding from the enemy. He was no longer afraid of the Polish grenades, no longer afraid of the liquid fires. He grabbed Otto by his hands and pulled him up by the shoulder and laid him to rest against the inner wall of the platform. Eager hands caught hold of Otto and Gunter and pulled them up just before the force of the passing train hit them on the face, and before Axle’s scream of death came to an abrupt end.

The two men sat of the platform floor and held on to each other.

“I killed Axel,” Otto sobbed uncontrollably. ‘I killed my grandson.”

“You are still a fool,” Gunter consoled him. “You didn’t kill anybody. There was nothing you could do. His chain got stuck on the tracks. He couldn’t get out in time.”

Alien hands lifted Otto up in gratitude. Otto had saved another life; this time, the life of an immigrant.

“ How in hell did I do that,” Gunter asked himself as he stood there, his legs shaking in excitement. It dawned on him that he was not the coward that he always thought he was. He remembered Otto telling him in Poland, “You would have done the same.” Now he understood. He was dazed but wonderfully at peace with himself.

Hands shaking in the aftermath of danger, Otto dug into his pocket. Yes, the watch was still there and without a scratch. And, it was ticking once again. Strangely, the watch was warm and shining. It almost seemed alive. He would give it to Karen, he decided. She would love to have it. Indeed she would need it to protect herself. The future belonged to her. The dangers of peace were more difficult and complex than that of the confrontations of war. The battlefields of the Third Reich had gone forever. He didn’t need it anymore.

Otto and Gunter leaned on each other and slowly, painfully, made their way out. The police and paramedics rushed by, siren wailing. The street musician was still playing his violin. The prostitutes still stood by the gumball machines soliciting business. Down the road, the Linden leaves danced in the breeze. They were at peace. The distant demons dancing in the dark recesses of their minds had been finally exorcised.

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