May 5th, 1988
He found the telegram in his mailbox on the 4th.
This was it. It was now happening. The last few years might have been like a dream, but the months leading up to this moment had been like one long day right before a storm. The clouds are gathering and the air pressure drops, and you welcome the thing that is coming but at the same time you are nervous. There had been massive preparation leading up to this moment. And here it was, the telegram, finally in his hands.
He knew in the back of his mind that, under what one in the West might call “normal circumstances,” it wouldn’t have been a sure thing that he and C would stay together. It wasn’t a sure thing as it was, but they were in love, and there was so much riding on the decision now that there really wasn’t room for second thoughts. The decision had been made and they were sticking to it. They’d met a couple of years before, back when she had come to his hometown to visit a mutual friend, and sparks had flown from the start. Of course, he was not allowed to visit her country, so they met regularly in Prague. And they spoke for hours on the phone, knowing full well that the state security services were listening. Sometimes C would joke about it, like she was speaking directly to them. Only someone from the West could have that much confidence about mocking the Stasi.
Eventually they realized that the only solution was to get married, so they got all their paperwork in order: application for permission to marry a foreigner, application for a permanent exit visa due to said marriage. This last point had required some careful thought – he would have done anything to leave the GDR and emigrate to the West, but doing so could jeopardize his brother’s chances to attend university or be promoted at work. The state tended to hold things like that against your family if you demonstrated a desire to leave.
The brother decided to learn a trade, so now there was no immediate danger to anyone else’s future. They arranged a modest wedding and reception. As it had to take place there in East Germany, he did most of the planning. C’s parents came over, as did several of her friends. His friends were there. His parents did not come. In fact, his mother, in a fit of pique from some incomprehensible insult, had handed him a check, his inheritance, and told him not to come into her house again. Hearing that, his father had merely sat there and said, “That’s bitter” to the floor.
After the wedding night, C drove her car back over the border, packed with more of his things. And then the waiting began.
When the telegram came, granting permanent exit from the GDR, you had to quickly collect the relevant papers at the relevant government authorities in order to receive the official exit visa – and it was only valid for 24 hours. He’d already assigned to various friends everything he couldn’t take with him – furniture, housewares, his prized LP collection. After the telegram arrived, he called around, and they gathered that evening for one last night of drinking, smoking, and reminiscing together. It felt permanent, and sad. He wanted nothing more than to get out and experience life in a free country, but it was painful to look at his friends and wonder if he would ever see them again. He was leaving 27 years of his life behind, locked away forever behind barbed wire and a wall.
A few of his closest friends had brought sleeping bags along and crashed on his floor. The next morning, they accompanied him to the train station, where they all said their last goodbyes. There were tears. He promised he would write. What a feeling it was, the finality of it, as the train pulled away from the station. He was leaving his country and the only home he’d ever known, and even though he’d hated it and couldn’t wait to get out, it still came with a measure of unease. What would happen to him now? Would he even make it out? If they were feeling ornery, the East German border police were not above playing games with those bearing exit visas.
There were three older women in the train compartment with him. Two looked past retirement age – retirees had more freedom to travel to the West, since the GDR more than half-hoped they’d leave permanently (after which they would no longer be able to draw on their pensions). The third woman probably had a temporary travel permit. No one spoke. This train served as a normal regional train with stops along the way, with people getting on and off until it reached the last town before the border.
There at that last town, the East German customs officials summoned him to leave the train and join them for a little round of questions in their administrative building. They made him unpack all his baggage and identify everything, while the train sat in the station. They searched through his things, examined his customs forms, asked him all sorts of questions. After an hour, they were satisfied and allowed him to board again, and then the police came through to see everyone’s travel papers. The train moved again. He stood in the aisle outside his compartment, smoking cigarette after cigarette by the window and watching the land roll by. They passed through the death strip, something he had naturally never seen before with his own eyes, and recognized it as the furthermost boundary of his entire world until that moment. Then, suddenly, the other passengers began to relax and became more talkative.
A member of the Bavarian border police appeared – Grüss Gott, where are you traveling to? Ah, Munich? You’re moving there to be with your wife? Very nice.
He had never heard someone in uniform speak to him in such a friendly manner. The atmosphere on the train lightened considerably.
He was in the West. He was out.
C was waiting on the platform when the train pulled into Munich. It happened to be her thirtieth birthday, and she’d made reservations at a nice restaurant downtown. He still remembers everything about that first day. It was a beautiful spring evening, the sun was still shining, and he was riding through his wonderful new city in the passenger seat of his new wife’s Citroen. He was indescribably happy, with a feeling that his future – their future – fanned out before him, seemingly without limit. Hinterm Horizont geht’s weiter. They would travel. They would start a family.
There was no way for him to know that within two years they would split up, that the Wall would come down, that his old country would cease to exist, that he’d start a new career – after it was clear that employers considered his East German diploma, from the best of universities, somehow suspect – and that neither the career change nor the divorce would be his last.
Anna
This is a study for a work planned for a later date.
My grandmother Anna was born in 1912 in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Her family were Slovak immigrants. Her mother, Julia, had been born in America, but Anna’s father had come over as a boy with his parents. Anna was the second daughter—her sister Helen was two years older—and she would soon be a big sister herself to three boys.
Anna’s father worked as a core maker in a factory. He had only his parents nearby, but Anna’s mother, Julia, had parents and several siblings. There was Aunt Mary, Uncle Nick, Uncle John, who was gassed during World War One and suffered from the effects the rest of his life. Uncle Michael died from the Spanish Flu in 1918. There was Uncle Joe, Uncle George, and Aunt Anna, who later spent time in an insane asylum.
Helen died of diphtheria at age 12. Her coffin was carried by a glass-walled wagon to the cemetery. Suddenly, Anna was the oldest child, and didn’t have a big sister to watch out for her anymore.
At 14, Anna’s parents made her drop out of school and work in town.
Julia gave birth to a last child, Marie, prematurely. Marie only lived for a few months, and Julia herself died soon after. Anna’s father got re-married to a woman who preferred her own children to his. This created difficulties. Anna, suddenly a motherless adolescent, out of school, curious and bored and coming of age in the middle of the roaring twenties, literally went to town. She told me once about a speakeasy on Charlotte Street—the kind with a little shuttered door that the bouncer would open and check you out before he’d let you inside. She went to dance halls. She had admirers, some of them college boys, the sons of doctors. She must have been having the time of her life.
When she became pregnant at age 18, Anna went to live with her maternal grandmother. Her father had chased her around the yard with an axe, threatening to kill her. She kept the baby. That was my mother, whom the family—all those aunts and uncles—protected and sheltered. The painful awareness of being fatherless only surfaced once she attended school. At some point, the family intervened and a suitable man was found. John’s mother had come from the same village as Anna’s grandfather. He had a good job in the tool and die factory, and he wasn’t married.
The wedding was in July. Anna wore navy blue. The state issued my mother a new birth certificate. Anna began calling herself Anne more often. It sounded more American.
When Anne was 39, John passed away, at home, after a grueling bout with cancer.
Six years later, the wife of one of those college boys passed away, also cancer. This led to the next chapter of Anne’s life — she married again and they moved into his converted summer bungalow in the woods. She kept house, fed the birds, planted flower bulbs, later babysat and sewed clothing for her grandchildren and generally enjoyed a simple life away from town.
But her past never allowed her to stop worrying — about us, about an early death, about ruin should something happen to someone on her watch. Like many people who had recovered from trauma, she was insecure about her security, never certain it wouldn’t all be taken away. There was a lasting shame in what she had gone through as a teen—the death of her sisters, then her mother, her father kicking her out of the house, the father of her child (a man who, we discovered much, much later, married someone else, someone from his social circle, three months after my mother was born.) When we were kids, she drove us crazy with her worrying. She also had opinions we didn’t always want to hear, but she never held a grudge against anyone, at least not that we were aware of.
Anne made it to 91, living by herself after our Uncle Al (the college boy that she married) died. She got into town regularly with the shuttle bus, did the crossword puzzle, kept up with the local gossip at the hair salon, wrote letters to me overseas. I was a professional singer at the time. I think she enjoyed telling people that. I hope she did.
In the last letter I have from her, she asked me to say a prayer for her soul when I sing. I still perform with an amateur group from time to time, and when I remember, I quietly say: Nana, this is for you.
For All Flesh Is As Grass
My husband is a bookseller, and several years ago he got a phone call from a potential seller. She was an elderly woman who was looking for someone to buy her small private library of books, and he had been recommended to her. In his line of work, this is fairly normal. In fact, 90% of the people who called him with these requests were elderly women from the area. They are moving because their husbands recently passed away, and they are downsizing to an apartment in the city or a senior residence, and now it’s finally time to get rid of all those books, but of course no one can bear the thought of throwing them out. This is where my husband came in — in a profession where one has to be part antiques dealer, part funeral home director, he has a kind and knowledgeable manner which left them assured that their old books would be handled with the utmost care and would “go to a good home”. Almost everybody understands that it works under the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell principle, because no one wants to hear explicitly that their late beloved’s worn-out bestseller paperback with the parts underlined in red pen is going straight into the recycling bin
But back to my story. Frau König had plans to sell her apartment and move into a posh senior residence on the other side of the lake. On the phone, she emphasized that she had some rather valuable books, and invited my husband to come to her house so that he could make an appraisal. When he got there, she sat him down in a chair and presented him with… three somewhat underwhelming and altogether worthless old books from the 1950s. He didn’t lie to her, but neither did he jump up and leave, and maybe she was just testing his reaction. She hinted at more treasures in her office downstairs. Frau König didn’t have a date set for the move, nor a buyer for her apartment, but apparently she needed someone lined up to take her books. And so began a somewhat weird, years-long business relationship, where she would make lists of the books she was ready to part with, and my husband would drive over and pick them up, sometimes packed in little paper gift bags she’d had lying around. Almost none of the books had a market value over a few dollars, but we felt that it wouldn’t be right to wave her off now. At some point I began to tag along, and she would make us mediocre coffee and chat with us about politics.
Unlike the other widows who were unloading their deceased husbands’ collections, Frau König had never married. She’d had what sounded like a pretty interesting career working for German embassies, though, which had her traveling to places like Russia and Ethiopia. She’d had connections with Africa and some interesting art on the walls, and a lovely old grandfather clock, probably a family heirloom. Her taste in books ran to travel literature and romance novels. She seemed lonely, although we couldn’t say for sure, as we weren’t that close. Our visits were often preceded by a good measure of reluctance and eye-rolling, but often we’d both agree, in the car afterward, that we felt happy to have done a good deed, even a mitzvah, and so maybe we were doing ourselves a good deed as well.
When she finally had a moving date and a buyer for her apartment, Frau König summoned us over to settle accounts regarding the price of the books. My husband had long had a bad feeling about this, because he didn’t think she was going to be happy with his price, especially after that first “presentation” of her treasures. It turned out surprisingly well. She was taking a heavy old bookcase with her to the senior residence, and the books that she wanted to keep with her were placed, just so, inside it. But she didn’t have anyone who could note their current order and put them back that way upon arrival. “That’s no problem,” said my husband, while I pulled out my smartphone to photograph each shelf. In the end, she offered to settle our accounts that way—instead of payment for the books we had taken off her hands, we’d come to her new place and put her remaining books back in order. Thinking back on this, I am fairly sure she could have done this by herself. But we were happy to oblige.
Soon after that, I left on a trip to America, and thought it would be nice to send a postcard to Frau König in her new home. We had started to become a bit fond of her, like an elderly neighbor or a distant cousin. Plus, she had moved to our side of the lake, so visiting her at the senior residence was an actual option now and then.
While I was away, my husband had arranged to see Frau König a few days after the big move. He found her in the lobby, asleep in an upholstered chair, so he quietly took a seat and waited for her to wake up. When she did, she didn’t recognize him. “And who are you?” she asked. But then her senses returned and she suggested they move to the cafe. She was distraught at the chaos in her apartment, she said. “Everything is a mess!” He offered to help, but was surprised to see everything in perfect order. She had even had her pictures hung on the walls. After chatting a little while longer, they agreed that we could come by when I was back in town so that we would get her bookcase in order and maybe invite her out for coffee. A week later my husband was at her old apartment, picking up a small sofa bed she had offered us. For some reason we had agreed, thinking it could serve as a day bed in the office—honestly, I don’t know what we were thinking. Anyway, when he got there the new owners were already fully underway with renovation work and just wanted that pile of her stuff gone.
Three weeks later, after my return, we called her new telephone number and got no answer. But we were busy and just thought we’d try again later. You already know where this is heading. An email arrived from her nephew from up north in Bremen. His aunt had passed away in her sleep, just three days after my husband’s visit. After all that preparing and organizing and work, she’d been in her new home for a mere nine days.
The nephew had contacted us because he thought we might like to take those remaining books and the bookcase as well, as the apartment had to be cleared out in two weeks. She had named him as the executor to her estate. We met him in the nearly empty apartment, and he immediately started complaining about the trouble and the timing of both her move and her demise, and then complained pointedly about the woman herself, despite our having just shared warm and friendly stories about meeting her. He suggested we could pick out what books we liked, because “the recycling dumpster is right at the end of the hall” and the rest could be carted there. My husband set aside a small pile of books, which seemed to irritate the nephew. In short, he expected money, and the fewer books we were taking, the less money he could expect. He also requested an offer for the bookcase, and when I gave him one (quite low, as we had not understood his intentions earlier, and had thought we were doing him a favor by helping to empty the apartment), he suppressed a laugh and replied that he’d just as soon have it taken to the dump. “Then you should do that,” said my husband before taking the high road (and I love him for this) and explaining the value of the various items he had set aside (“this may be something, in any event, don’t throw it out.”) Then we wished him luck and departed— empty handed but utterly relieved.
Back outside, we looked at each other and exhaled. “No wonder she never talked about her family.”
We still have her old sofa bed.
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