I Remember; Twenty Years Gone
Nineteen years ago this summer, I looked out the backseat window of an eighties-something Ford, staring around at a ghost town around me. Bleak, simple grey concrete apartment buildings rose from cracking sidewalks, the roads around rough and empty. Weeds grew through the cracks in the sidewalk and around the fence base beyond. I remember seeing a unpainted car that looked as if someone had just welded or riveted sheet metal together into the vague shape of a square, and attached wheels. That too was abandoned.
Or, at least, as with everything else, it appeared to be. Even at eleven years old I knew there had to be people around, but although it was mid-day there wasn’t a soul to be seen. No one walking the sidewalks, no cars passing us, no lights in the windows. No children playing, no one taking a stroll, no businessmen heading home. A ghost town. A ghost town where the ghosts were still alive.
Only a few miles away, I had spent the night before watching news affecting this ghost town. It's long-time Russian guardians were leaving. Pulling out. And doing so quickly. Missiles were being transported back home. But they had to be removed first. From apartments building basements, like the one we passed by the next day. The news interviewed the Russian CO; I don't know what he said, but he wasn't happy. Sentry towers on our way through the countryside to Berlin attested to the political arrangements. They were standing tall and empty along our route through the woodlands the day before.
Now as we drove down another street, scant miles away from the prosperous, bustling Western version of this city, I got to see the effects of that news standing guard in front of my eyes. A row of Russian soldiers stood lining a razor topped concrete barrier, armed to the teeth, and carefully watching this little Ford slowly pass a few feet away. Eyes carefully neutral, weapons at the ready, impassive faces watched as the car rolled by the gate and the men standing in front. We went on by. I don't think any one spoke.
We didn’t stay long in this ghost town. I don’t think any of us felt entirely comfortable. I know I was not. Within a few minutes we left the not-dead ghost town behind and returned through the fresh opening of a one hundred and twenty four mile and twenty-eight year concrete physical manifestation of this particular scar in world history. Ahead of us, we welcomed the sight of capitalism and all its downfalls. Perhaps it's the first time I’ve thought a neon sign was a beautiful sight.
I’m reminded of these two vivid memories by a piece of masonry, no larger than my thumb, from the tip to the first knuckle. Rough on one side, a thick layer of ugly green paint covers the smooth flat surface. Not much to look at, a chipped bit of concrete; sent to me in the bottom of a package a few months after this particular scab was removed.
But that piece of masonry has a history older than I, and certainly much farther reaching. The reach of its participation in politics, policies, cultures, beliefs, human desperation, tears, sweat, blood, ideals, world focus, domination, separation, involving the poor and weak, and the rich and most powerful is slowly being forgotten except in a few memories. Perhaps the exceptions, too, are ones living in closest context to it, emotionally; physically. No ties, no memories.
Certainly, it is not a something I dwell on too often, except for the occasional recall of that cracking concrete building, that lost car, that eerie silence, the AK-47s in nervous fingers waiting for us to pass. My memories of this place, this era, come from a subdued eleven-year-old’s perspective, and yet they stay with me, even now.
Twenty years after the physical divider fell, I know that landscape is no longer the same. I’ve known some of those inhabitants, and they were neighbors on my bus, in my school, in my workplace. But, a mere year and a half after November 9, 1989, the ghosts of East Berlin were just learning to live again.
