‘I am unsure whether they are enemies of Poland, traitors, agents or complete fools,’ Wałęsa said in a recent interview, calling the PiS leaders narrow-minded demagogues who sow discord and incite hatred. ‘They do not care what damage they cause as long as it helps them to win elections.’
As the rain eased off, I shrugged on my coat and wove back along the rain-slicked cobbles and beneath the Green Gate (Wałęsa’s private office is in a room above one of its arched passages). On the Motława embankment, where sailing ships had once unloaded their cargo, two or three damp buskers vied for the attention of the evening’s last tourists. I lowered my head to hurry past the riverfront cafes until I heard, ‘Give me a word and I’ll sing you a song.’
‘Any word?’ I asked.
‘Any word,’ replied the man.
His approach caught my attention. He had brown eyes and the sort of thin, colourless face that’s so easily forgotten, so I stopped to look at him. He was no older than twenty-five and – I guessed – out of work. He stood about six feet tall with a thin beard, thin body and straggly dark hair. He wore wire spectacles. He was nobody’s concern, or so I imagined. At his feet was a cardboard sign ‘Your Song – 10 zł’.
‘Love? Home? Heartbreak?’ he prompted as if to help me to decide, stepping forward and unzipping his guitar case. On it raindrops glistened under the gaslight.
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘That’s two words,’ he replied. When I laughed he added, with a crinkly smile, ‘That’d be an extra 10 złoty.’
‘Deal,’ I said, reaching for my wallet.
He took the notes, tucked them carefully into his breast pocket and stared at me. ‘I remember,’ he repeated in English and then Polish. Pamiętam. He turned to look out at the water and then he started to sing.
‘Tak niewiele żądam, Tak niewiele pragnę,’ he warbled, strumming his guitar. ‘Tak niewiele widziałem…’
I understood none of the words but I sensed his emotion, which surprised me given the damp night and modest fee. He wasn’t begging, wasn’t relying on handouts, but rather offering me words in an exchange.
‘Tak niewiele myślę, Tak niewiele znaczę…’
As he sang I couldn’t help but wonder if his father had worked in the Lenin Shipyard, standing alongside Wałęsa to change the future. I imagined that his old man had then lost his job, laid off in the first waves of privatisation and instead of the gift of freedom, had found himself collecting unemployment benefits. I wondered if he had begun to long for a lost life of yore.
‘Wolność kocham i rozumiem, Wolności…’
‘Your song,’ said the proud, thin-faced young man when he had finished. ‘That’s all I have to offer.’
I returned to the elderly couple’s little house. My host was waiting up, having put his wife to bed. It’s the happiest moment of her day, he told me, and I imagined the poor, forgetful woman tucked under the covers and drifting off into contented oblivion.
I’d recorded the busker’s song on my phone and played it back in the cramped kitchen, asking the elderly man to translate for me. Rings of withered flower petals lay on the table top around his wife’s sad little vases. After a minute he said, ‘But there’s nothing here about remembering. It’s an old song.’
‘I don’t ask for too much,’ the busker had sung, ‘I don’t want too much, / I may lose everything…’
His song – my song – was ‘Kocham wolność’ or ‘I Love Freedom’ by Bogdan Łyszkiewicz, the Polish John Lennon.
‘But freedom, I love and understand it, / Freedom, I’m not able to give it away…’
Overhead the bells of Gdańsk tolled as night closed in on Poland.
GERMANY
31
Beyond the Horizon
Here it began, and ended. Here at the flashpoint of the world rose the Berlin Wall, and here it fell away as an historical aberration. Here in 1989 I made a trail of footprints across the smoothed sand of no-man’s-land, believing that Europe had changed for ever.
I’d first seen the heinous barrier half a lifetime earlier. At the heart of the continent had been watchtowers, barbed wire and Grenztruppen border guards instructed to shoot fellow citizens who wanted to live under a different system. The sight of that great divide, between a capitalist West and a communist East, had shaken me to the core. I’d stood for hours on the wooden observation platform overlooking Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. I’d stared in silence across the death strip, stunned that a clash of ideas could be set in cement at the centre of a city.
Then one cool November night came the most unexpected and joyous moment of the century. Ossis and Wessis, East and West, danced together on the Wall, holding hands, waving sparklers, united in jubilation for the new beginning. Swarms of buzzing Trabants – the cardboard car for comrades, belching blue smoke, breaking down, being pushed – circled gangs of soldiers dismantling the concrete slabs. At Checkpoint Charlie the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich – who had been harassed, intimidated and stripped of his citizenship by the Soviets – played an impromptu Bach suite. Bouquets of flowers covered the windscreens of police vans. British squaddies served cups of scalding tea to the rippling crowd. As they drank and sang, the East Germans glanced back at the barrier, hardly believing they were finally free. Soon the slabs of white concrete would be stacked in neat piles. The barbed wire was coiled into tumbleweed balls. Within a year the entire Wall – bar a few token stretches – truly vanished, leaving in its place only a discreet line of paving stones. The two halves of the country were reunited and Germans called the change die Wende.
The turning point.[18]
‘How could such a dark period of my life have become a musical?’ laughed Thomas Brussig, the post-Wende wunderkind novelist and screenwriter. ‘I’ll never get over the miracle.’
I’d known Brussig for more than a dozen years, having first met him soon after the publication of his comedy of terrors Heroes Like Us. The first great unification novel, it told the story of an East German Forrest Gump (and wannabe Stasi spy) whose birth was induced by the rumblings of Soviet tanks on their way to crush the Prague Spring (his mother had paused in her labour to point them in the right direction) and whose penis was responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall.
‘Heroes Like Us brought a kind of relief that jokes could be made about totalitarianism,’ Brussig told me. ‘And that such a crazy story could be brewed from those dark days.’
Spring had arrived with me in Berlin. Lime-green buds burst on the linden trees along Bornholmer Strasse and dappled shadows whispered across the faces of the grand, ranked apartment blocks. Sparrows fluttered and chattered in the dark ivy. A pair of dancing shoes lay abandoned on top of a postbox.
On that balmy morning, Brussig met me on Bösebrücke, the first border crossing to be opened in November 1989. It was still early when he mounted the S-Bahn steps and shook my hand. We planned to spend the day together, walking along the line of the old Iron Curtain, across the city’s waist, to reach Potsdamer Platz where his ‘miracle’ Cold War musical – Hinterm Horizont – had played to sell-out audiences for the best part of a decade.
18
German reunification was a moment of unique historical significance, wrote historian Ian Kershaw in