‘I might call you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I have a little idea.’
Forty-Eight
Phil struggled to wake up the following morning. Emma was quiet at breakfast in the Hotel Bristol. She asked cursorily whether he had had a good time last night. She was thoughtful; she seemed anxious, scared even. And well she should.
Her fear made Phil feel happier with the decision he had taken on his way back to the Bristol the night before, although that decision made it more difficult to say goodbye. He went upstairs to his room to pack; he stuffed the clothes he had originally brought with him into his rucksack and rolled the new clothes they had bought together in Paris into a couple of laundry bags for Emma to add to her luggage. Her plan was that he should check out and take a taxi for the airport, and then she would set out for a day trip to East Berlin to meet Kay, returning to the Hotel Bristol that evening.
Phil had a different plan.
They stood together in the lobby, Emma having paid Phil’s room bill.
‘Thank you so much for coming with me, Philip,’ she said, her face stern, her tone matter-of-fact, despite her words. ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you.’ She hesitated. ‘You saved my life. I shall miss you.’
‘I shall miss you too, Grams,’ Phil repeated, somewhat lamely.
Then her reserve crumbled, and she threw herself at him, burying her head in his chest. He put his arms around her.
After a little while she stepped back. ‘All right. Have a good trip back. And give my love to your mother and your sister. Oh, and your father.’ This with a smile.
‘Bye, Grams.’
Phil turned and left the hotel. Emma had got the doorman to procure a taxi, and it was waiting for him.
‘Tegel?’ asked the driver.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Phil. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Where is a good place I can store this rucksack for the day?’
‘Zoo Station has left luggage.’
Zoo Station was only a couple of minutes away. The taxi driver waited while Phil dumped his rucksack, and then took him eastwards to Friedrichstrasse and the Wall.
The Wall actually ran west to east at this point, Friedrichstrasse bisecting it south to north. Checkpoint Charlie was the crossing place for foreigners entering East Berlin; it was situated between the American sector and the southern edge of Mitte, the former city centre around Unter den Linden, which was now in the Russian sector. On the Allied side, the checkpoint comprised a hut, some sandbags and two signs: one declaring ‘Allied Checkpoint’ and another announcing ‘You are leaving the American sector’ in English and then repeated in Russian, French and German. An American military policeman waved Phil through.
He walked past a red-and-white-striped barrier and over the narrow strip of no-man’s-land to the more extensive obstacles on the other side. Watchtowers overlooked a large shed where the border formalities took much longer. An East German border guard in a forbidding grey-green uniform took Phil’s passport. The guard checked him for guns, ammunition and printed papers; the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide had warned him of this, and so Phil had reluctantly left the book with his rucksack at the station, having memorized all it had to say about East Berlin. He was required to change six Deutschmarks fifty for a similar number of flimsier East German marks. The five-mark note he received bore a picture of some sixteenth-century preacher in a floppy hat: not very communist, although on the back a combine harvester did its stuff for agrarian productivity. Tourists were supposed to spend all their currency during the day — it could not be exchanged on return to the West.
Phil then spent forty minutes hanging around the northern, East German section of Friedrichstrasse, waiting for Emma and avoiding the occasional suspicious glance from the border guards. If someone was watching him more discreetly, he couldn’t tell.
Eventually he saw her tall figure marching along the street towards him. She hailed a taxi, and Phil moved quickly. The taxi was tiny, with no rear doors, so as Emma climbed in over the passenger seat, Phil bundled in after her.
‘Philip!’ she said.
‘That’s me,’ said Phil, grinning.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she demanded.
‘I couldn’t let you do this by yourself,’ Phil said.
‘But I expressly forbade you from coming with me. It’s not safe, Philip!’
‘I know. That’s why I’m here, Grams. I can help. You know I can help.’
‘But I don’t want you to!’ said Emma, genuinely angry now. ‘I insist you get out of this taxi.’
‘No,’ said Phil. ‘I’m with you on this, Grams. Wherever it takes you.’ He smiled. ‘You’d have done the same when you were my age. You can’t deny it.’
‘Excuse me, comrades,’ said the driver in German. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘One moment,’ said Emma. She looked at Phil. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. She smiled back at him, reluctantly at first, but then resorted to a full beam of relief. ‘Prenzlauer Berg,’ she said to the driver. ‘And take us along Unter den Linden.’
The taxi was tiny, with an engine that sounded like a lawnmower. The driver was large and spoke with the by-now recognizable Berliner accent.
‘Is this car made of plastic?’ Phil said, tapping the roof. It was very different from the Mercedes in which he had arrived at Checkpoint Charlie. The little vehicle was, however, identical to almost every other car on the road.
In a couple of minutes they turned right on to a grand, broad street of old imperial buildings interspersed with more modern structures. And a dual line of small trees running down its centre — lindens, no doubt. Above and a little to the left rose a tall needle with a large ball two-thirds of the way up. A TV tower, Phil remembered from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide.
‘That’s the Stabi,’ Emma said, pointing to an imposing grey stone facade, through whose arches Phil could just see a courtyard with a fountain.
Phil looked around eagerly. He had never been in a communist country before. Some things were different: the modern, dreary blocks, the tiny cars, the TV tower watching over everything as if monitoring the movements of the East Berliners below. But the people appeared pretty much the same, although very few wore jeans. And, frankly, a lot of the modern architecture in West Berlin was pretty dire too.
‘It’s not that different to West Berlin,’ Phil said.
‘It’s very different from Berlin in 1939, believe me,’ said Emma. ‘Then there were giant red swastika flags hanging from the buildings, and men in uniform marching everywhere. And no trees.’
‘No trees?’
‘Hitler tore them down to build the S-Bahn.’
That explained why the new lindens were so small.
They passed through a large square, Alexanderplatz, which had become the centre of East Berlin. A group of workers in hard hats beamed down on them with unbridled joy from a massive poster. The address Emma had given the driver turned out to be a five-storey block of flats, built since the war, opposite a row of older tenement buildings that had survived the bombing and the Red Army.
A column of buzzers guarded the door to the building.
Emma hesitated. ‘I don’t want you to listen to this.’
‘Too late,’ Phil said.
‘I will have to talk about things I have kept from you up till now. Things which will be dangerous for you to know.’ Emma paused, relief at his presence mixing with worry for her grandson. ‘She might not even let us in.’
‘Then we’ll think of another way to talk to her.’
‘All right.’ Emma pressed the buzzer.
‘Hallo?’
‘Oh, hello, Kay,’ Emma replied in English. ‘It’s Emma. Can I come in?’