HOLLY ANHOLT

Demonstration

SHE SAT ON A ROCK with her sign on the muddy ground near her feet. A few people had flashlights but mostly it was dark. We were somewhere in the countryside, not far from the city, having arrived in motley cars strewn around like lumps of coal, darker than the night. Beyond us were the barracks of the asylum-seekers. We caught glimpses of their lives, men in underwear, women with wash, the stark, tinny light of a television. Curtains blew through open windows. It was a quiet moment on the new front that had opened, between the asylum-seekers and those who didn’t want them in the country.

I suppose you would say we were there to keep the peace. Schoolteachers and lawyers and students and solid citizens, responding to Anja Mann’s call: “We have to say to them: no. Now. Before it starts to flame up big. In particular, to show these Eastern police that there’s a price also if they ignore the problem.” Though I wasn’t there for such noble reasons. I was there because this was my lawyer’s other life, which I’d managed to know about only as rumor, and I was curious, and felt a little bit obliged, like somebody who’s been to somebody’s house for dinner several times and has never asked to see the beautiful garden. Nor did I think Simona was there to be altruistic either. It was more a reflex with Simona. Tell her about a demonstration and she would come.

But on this cold night there was something more. Simona was lying in wait. She was like a beggar in the shadows. From her rock she watched Anja march here and there, checking lists, bucking up spirits, giving orders, courting the waning interest of the TV people – whatever might be done in the dead spots by the captain of an undertaking such as ours. In the darkness we could make out little, but Anja was so upright, with her top-knot of hair and prominent nose, as if some mad Prussian geneticist in search of civic courage had attempted a cross between a samurai and Charles de Gaulle, that the faintest shadow of her was unmistakable. When Anja disappeared altogether, Simona resembled a bored, disconsolate child, her chin resting in her hand or her foot making idle circles in the muddy dirt.

And then Anja would reappear, like a looming ocean liner out of an old movie’s fog, and Simona would follow her with her eyes. Beseeching glances, knowing glances, helpless glances; a full repertory of pleading, to all of which Anja was immune. Though it was possible, as well, that she hadn’t even noticed Simona sitting on that rock, or seen her name on the sign-in sheet. But I didn’t believe it; Anja was too organized for that, too in control. She was one of those for whom survival must have meant scanning the horizon.

A conversation that never took place:

Forgive me, my queen, but I only wrote notes until 1983, I only wrote notes for two years and a half, I only pointed out your Zionist tendencies twice.

Forget it, my lowly subject, whose nose properly touches the ground, my slave, unworthy and pathetic, whom I wouldn’t forgive in ten thousand lives, who is only telling me this now because it will come out anyway, who would still keep it secret if she could, who only got that place in the Writers Union house to write a fatuous, self-serving autobiography by ratting me out.

It never took place because Anja wouldn’t allow it to. At last Simona got up from her rock and went over to where Anja was talking with others in a circle. She loitered at the periphery until there was room for her to elbow in, then stood in silent hope that her relentlessness would soon pay off. Others drifted away. “Anja…” Perhaps she got that far. I couldn’t hear but I could see Anja turn away from the circle. Was it at the exact moment Simona spoke or caught her glance? Simona followed her and touched Anja’s sleeve, a shadow puppet’s gesture. Anja pulled her arm away.

Simona came back to her rock and her sign. Sometime before she had told me she was leaving Berlin for Jerusalem. Now wasn’t that nice news, I had thought, but didn’t say, afraid that if I showed any support for the idea, she might reconsider. She was gripping the handle of her sign with both hands now, as if it were her last friend, she and her sign taking on the world. But the cardboard part of it still dragged in the mud. “Asyls in! Nazis out!” Perhaps it was my mother’s pity that I kept feeling for Simona; if you ask, you shall be forgiven, the world according to Doe. And why not, what was wrong with that, wasn’t that the only way the world would ever work?

And Anja Mann, heroic leader of the old GDR dissidents, now left without much of a portfolio, rooting around for the next evil thing? What was wrong with her, that she couldn’t forgive two years in jail, slanders, family suffering, psychiatric tortures, loss of health? I felt like a fool that night. I was confused and I hated to be confused. Simona had a few tears, as well. I hated her tears. It was some moments after she produced them that I went after Anja, not ostentatiously, but in Simona’s plain sight, as if I were sick of hiding some stupid thing. We spoke for a minute or so. She thanked me for coming. When I arrived back in the shadows, Simona asked me, “So you know her?”

“Anja?”

“You know her quite well.”

“She’s been my lawyer. With the claims.”

“I should have guessed,” Simona said. The words, of course, of a woman who’s just discovered the identity of her husband’s lover.

“Sorry,” I said.

But I offered no further explanation, nor did she ask for one.

A stalemate of little lies.

Later the skinheads came. From the back of the shelter we heard a window break and then shouting. We jumped up, grabbing our signs as though they were weapons. Our signs, our brave defense against the rock-throwers. We raced around to the back of the barracks and tried to form a line. It was all fairly chaotic and exciting and never seemed particularly dangerous. Inside the barracks men in t-shirts ran from window to window. Whoever had flashlights shone them into the woods, trying to catch glimpses of the attackers. There couldn’t have been many. I caught glimpses of two or three, advancing or retreating, as shadowy as guerrillas. A couple more windows broke. The skins disappeared into the woods. Later I would learn that two of the boys from David’s car workshop were among the attackers, but I saw none of their faces that night. Anja’s demonstration made the evening news.