Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

122
TOM PERROTTA
Bumping Into Klaus:
A Cold War Encounter
ON THE FIRST DAY of August in 1982, after two weeks of sightseeing
in Western Europe—I was a college kid visiting on a summer
traveling fellowship—I said good-bye to my traveling companion
and boarded the night train from Frankfurt to West Berlin,
which passed through mostly East German territory and was
operated by East German personnel.
This journey, my first muffled contact with the Communist
world, was physically miserable and tinged with a vague sense of
menace. The train seemed to have been designed with the maximum
discomfort of its riders in mind. The seats were hard wooden
benches with only a tantalizing hint of padding, spaced so far apart
in the compartment that you couldn't stretch out your legs and
rest them on the seat in front of you, the way you could on cushy
capitalist trains.
To make matters worse, I was the fifth and final passenger to
arrive at my assigned compartment. My fellow passengers had
already staked out the corner seats, leaving me to fend for myself
in the No Man's Land in the middle of the bench, an ill-defined
space without armrests. A headrest was bolted into the wall a full
six inches above the top of my head.
A couple of hours into the journey, when I had finally managed
to close my eyes arid drift off into a state close enough to
sleep to be merciful, a soldier burst into our compartment and
demanded to see our papers. He was young, this soldier, with
apple-red cheeks and a short-barreled assault weapon slung across
his chest. I remembered faces like his from Triumph of the Will.
As the sole American in the compartment, I seemed to merit
extra scrutiny. The soldier scowled at my face and passport photo
with a ferocious diligence I found flattering, ridiculous, and threatening
all at once. Exhausted as I was, I sat up straight on the bench
and scowled right back at him, striking what I thought to be a
small blow for freedom.
II.
Ten days later I paid my first visit to East Berlin. By that point
I'd fallen into a mild depression. My trip wasn't working out as
I'd hoped.
A friend had been kind enough to arrange for me to stay in
West Berlin with a widowed psychoanalyst and her three young
sons. Dr. G. lived in a lovely stone house in Zehlendorf, an upscale
residential district surrounded by lakes and forests, about as far
from the gritty, concrete-and-barbed wire center of the city as you
could get. From Zehlendorf,West Berlin felt more like the Fresh
Air Fund than the epicenter of global conflict.
Dr. G. was an intelligent, forceful, very German woman who
took it upon herself to orchestrate my experience of the city. She
found my interest in the Wall unhealthy and superficial, and
encouraged me to explore the more wholesome side of the city—
its museums and landmarks, its thriving cultural life, its surprising
natural beauty.
"This morning you must visit Charlottenburg Castle," she'd say.
"In the afternoon I've arranged for you to go sailing on the Wannsee."
I usually did what she said, partly out of obligation and partly
because I was at loose ends and wanted someone to tell me what
to do. When I wasn't following Dr. G.'s orders, I was generally
tagging along with her fourteen and sixteen-year-old sons,
precocious hipsters with vaguely anarchist sympathies. They took