Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

126
city. Compared to the rest of the country, he said, East Berlin
was paradise.
Reluctantly, Karl nodded. "It's true," he said. "Here you see
only the chocolate."
Then, as if sensing he'd gone as far as he could go, Karl abruptly
drained his beer and stood up, reminding us that he had to work
in the morning. He shook my hand and nodded curtly to Klaus.
v.
Ever since I'd sat down, Klaus and I had been sharing episodes
of strangely intense eye contact. Now that we were alone he really
opened up, as though we'd already achieved some degree of
intimacy.
"GDR 15 good," he told me. "But only if you don't think. If
you start thinking, then it's very bad."
"At least East Berlin is better than the rest of the country," I
said, putting my new knowledge to quick use.
Klaus nodded thoughtfully. "You can live good here," he conceded.
"But a pig also lives good and then—" He karate-chopped
the tabletop, as though his hand were the blade of a butcher's ax.
Some men in a nearby booth turned to look.
Klaus lowered his voice. "You can go anywhere you want," he
reminded me. "I can't even go to Hungary on vacation."
When I asked why, he told me he'd been jailed for a year and a
half in the late Sixties, back when he was only a few years older than
I was now. He said he'd spent three months in solitary confinement.
"It wasn't so bad. When you're alone you have time to think."
He spun his finger in a circular motion near his temple. He said
he knew better than his captors, because he believed in the
freedom of the individual conscience. "No man can know what's
right for another man," he declared fiercely, as if daring me to
disagree.
All I could do was nod. We had downed several beers at that
point, and my incipient buzz was compounded by a feeling very
close to awe. Here I was behind the Wall, behind the Iron frigging
Curtain, drinking beer with a dissident, a man who had been jailed
for his beliefs.
Klaus went on to say that he'd lost his job as an engineer as a
result of his troubles, and^ that now he worked for the Lutheran
Church. For the most part the authorities left him alone, but they
still wouldn't let him go to Hungary. They wouldn't let him go
anywhere. He gazed at the table for a while, then looked up. His
eyes were moist and sorrowful.
"Come back next week," he told me. "I'll show you around
the city. Places you'd never see on your own."
Honored and excited by the invitation, I wrote Dr. G.'s phone
number on a beer coaster and slid it across the table.
VI.
I believed him.
I let myself believe that I had wandered into a bar full of uniformed
police officers in one of the world's most repressive police
states, and simply bumped into a dissident, a brave man who was
willing to speak his mind in a public place to a stranger—an
American, no less—even going so far as to liken his fellow citizens
to pigs being fattened for the slaughter.
In my defense, I can at least point out that I was troubled by
the encounter. My journal contains the following entry, written
through a mild hangover on the morning after my visit:
. . .as I headed back to the West, I began to wonder if I should
return when Klaus calls. Here I was, doing just what I'd hoped
when I came here, and it scared me. My typically western
suspicions began to appear. Was he gay? (After all, he had
touched me several times during our conversation.) Would he
get me into trouble for spying?
Despite these concerns, it didn't take much effort for me to
dismiss "my typically western suspicions." Klaus had seemed sincere
to me, if a bit reckless. And so what if he was gay? What did
that have to do with anything? As for the second question, it
seemed to me the height of paranoia to imagine that the Stasi, the
dreaded East German Secret Police, would waste time on me. I
was just a college kid. I didn't know any military secrets or harbor
any subversive designs against the East German state. I hadn't
even voted for Reagan.