UNDER THE LIMES
by Ian Hocking

Image: � Mimika Cooney

8:45 A.M., 2nd November, 1968, On The Berlin U6 Line Between Reinickendorfer Stra�e And Schwartzkopffstra�e

Today�s weather has come all the way from the Russian steppes, and it stirs our black and gold leaves, pushes the stray dogs into doorways and closes the windows of the city.

My moods are like these winds. In concert they make the weather of my soul. Down here in the underground, as my carriage rattles through Berlin�s concrete gut, I should be sheltered, but I am not. It is cold here. I hug my shawl.

There is a flower in the hair of the woman in front of me. I remember when Werner and I broke apart a window box for the rumour of a potato.

I will tell you about Werner, who was my twin brother.

My mother, who is now speechless, is French. In 1936, she was working in Berlin as an au pair when she first saw my father sitting in his wooden kiosk beneath a beautiful parade of trees. We Berliners called this street Unter den Linden, which translates as �under the limes�. The trees were dear to us. The trees made two parallel lines, so that each has a companion across the expanse of the street.

My mother approached my father out of pity. There was little business. Germany was mobilizing and vibrant, but the foundation of its strength was rotten years of hyperinflation, anxiety and resentment. Traders still went hungry. My father guessed her star sign, produced a coin from her ear, and married her. There was no crockery to break at their wedding, but they were happy.

Imagine the vibrancy of the limes on Unter den Linden. Imagine the playful wind weaving thread-like through the tress, sewing the pairs together. Before the war, those trees were unplugged by Hitler. They obscured the view of his military parades. The replanted trees are youthful and tender, but the street is the same, held in trust by our generous neighbour, the German Democratic Republic.

He � my father � joined the army in early 1941. My twin brother and I were born when he was in Poland. He returned to us twice before dying anonymously in Stalingrad. Werner and I never knew him and he never knew us. I have a photograph of a broken fountain once ringed by dancing, stone children. In my dreams it is a deep well and my father is still drowning in its black waters.

Werner liked to play with the last unbroken soldiers in our father�s old toy box. Mother would watch him wistfully, reminded of something. I played with rats. I tamed one but was forced to eat it three days before the surrender. Tired British soldiers patrolling our sector. The British had adopted us. Others in Berlin were adopted by the Americans, the French, and the Russians. I learned my first English words in an improvised school that ran for an hour a day in an old church two blocks away. I was taught by a British priest who spoke slow, flawless German through his nose. Werner did not attend. He was content to play truant with his lead soldiers and win money from the British soldiers with his ball-and-shell game. Like our father, he had inherited a sleight of hand. When I was crying, sitting forlornly in rubble, he would cheer me up by drawing a coin from my ear.

It took twenty years for the Wall to come. But it came as quickly as an earthquake in the night. First a fence, then concrete. Werner had been staying with friends in the east and was trapped. He phoned us breathlessly a month later. He had new friends. He was joining the army. He would be a soldier like his father. I cried for a week at this amputation.

The thump of a bent rail puts me back in the underground carriage. The atmosphere has changed. The train has travelled into East Berlin. Above us, the surface has been cut in two by the Wall, but down here, the old routes of the underground must be observed. The train, though it travels from one West Berlin station to another, will briefly pass forbidden stations in the East. It will dare not stop.

The train slows and I look to my left. The lights of this platform are dimmed. It is empty of passengers. The station sign for Schwartzkopfstra�e looks no different from those of the Allied Sector, but the convex metal plate wears a toupee of dust unmoved since the Wall's unhappy birth. All exits from this station are blocked. In the centre of the platform, the rotunda once been occupied by a taciturn newspaper seller is now home to a tall soldier in a greatcoat offering his naked hands to a stove. He ignores the train and my face pressed to the glass. His rifle leans outside, its nozzle poking through an empty panel. The guard dog is absent.

My heart turns like a tired motor. I have only seconds left.

�Werner!�

I feel movement in my fellow passengers. Perhaps they have turned, rescued from their boredom, to look at me pityingly as I go mad against the glass.

I slap the window again, lost in myself. �Werner!�

The guard in the rotunda only watches me. He is too tall to be Werner. Even if he were, he would be unable to acknowledge my presence without risking a court martial. I sink to my seat. Another journey has been wasted. Perhaps, I think, my informant was wrong. Perhaps Werner is no longer a guard in this station. Perhaps he has been posted into Mother Russia like our father, where a deep well waits to drown him.

Then, in the corner of the station, close to the exit, I see the sudden orange of a cigarette, and the dim shapes of a man and a dog. The man has been watching me.

I stare as he flicks away his cigarette. In the smallest of moments before the train clears the station, he draws a second cigarette from the cavernous ear of the dog. Then darkness shuts the window. I sag into my seat and meet the stares of my fellow Berliners with a smile. Werner and I, us twins, are together for a flash of time; for the briefest sleight of his hand.

Air sweeps through the carriage. A warm wind. For a moment, the weather of my soul is fine.

� Ian Hocking
Reproduced with permission

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