EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, they were heading east on an underground train. It emerged onto tracks rising two stories above street level. The fog had ascended overnight, forming a thick layer above the city. All of Berlin was exposed now beneath a dull metal sky.
Herb searched the horizon for a television tower, erected after he had lived here, which marked Alexanderplatz. He used it as a landmark to find familiar buildings—the Dom cathedral, government offices on Unter den Linden, the Bode museum. Once Herb recognized the East Berlin skyline, he was grateful the train had been so crowded that he and Gwen had to sit apart. He had expected this trip would revive painful memories but was unprepared for the distress he was feeling. He kept a vice grip on the chrome railing as neighborhoods unchanged after thirty years appeared. Looking at his white knuckles, trying to understand his reaction, he suddenly relaxed. Curiosity replaced panic.
In the summer of 1959, Herb was between his junior and senior year at Cornell. The United Nations had stationed his father with an East Berlin delegation attempting to de-escalate international tension over the large number of German Democratic Republic citizens fleeing to the west. He arranged for Herb to be hired as a temporary typist.
Herb still vividly remembered the anticipation he had felt at La Guardia and his subsequent disappointment with East Berlin—a gray, lifeless city. There was nothing to do other than work. Although he’d been tutored by a German graduate student and was semi-conversant in the language, no one would talk to him once they found out he was an American. Young East Germans assumed he was a spy from China under Stasi orders to pose as a tourist and entrap them into making subversive statements.
Herb spent his free time reading the Existentialists, especially Sartre. He stood in line at post offices and rode buses to overhear bits of conversation which he then transcribed. He planned to use his notes as dialogue in an absurdist play.
A week before Herb was to fly back to New York, his father took a rare day off so the two could visit museums. He was particularly interested in an exhibit of ancient coins that had just opened at the Bode.
It was hot and humid when they left the dingy studio apartment where Herb slept on a couch. Wanting to avoid the crowds, his father was irritated with Herb for delaying their departure by five minutes. Inside the museum, they had to climb a flight of stairs. At the top, his father grabbed Herb. Pale, sweating profusely, he said a few words in garbled Chinese and collapsed on the marble floor. Herb could recall jarring images of the events that followed but only guess at their actual sequence. His own scream for help. An ambulance’s klaxon horn. His father’s cold skin. Pacing the empty hallways of Charite’ Hospital. The repulsive odor of disinfectants. A German doctor saying, “I am sorry. Ist tot. Is dead.”
Herb had been a dilettante at college, toying with sciences and humanities. After that summer, he never took another course in philosophy. He never completed his play. He returned to Cornell and threw himself into the pre-medical curriculum.
Although the line was short, Herb and Gwen had to wait an hour to get through Checkpoint Charlie. All the GDR border guards were on the other side, inspecting passports and waving through the East German horde going west. A single unarmed functionary, unfamiliar with the crossing protocol, was gate-keeping for anyone entering East Berlin.
They walked to Unter den Linden, the central esplanade of East Berlin. Here were the same eighteenth century rococo buildings and spare, postwar communist construction Herb had seen in 1959. Only the boulevard’s double rows of lindens were different, bare skeletons in winter rather than the leafy arbor of his memory.
No, he realized, something else was missing from the cityscape. None of it was imbued with menace. They were facing the Russian Embassy, a clunky, wedding-cake-shaped, marble edifice. Hammers and sickles were etched above each window. It was laughably pretentious.
He sat on a bench, trying to make sense of this disconnect between the inanity of what he was observing and the terror and alienation he remembered. He took his pulse, a calm sixty beats per minute. He saw Gwen looking worriedly at him.
“I’m all right. Just remembering. I lived here thirty years ago, before the wall went up.”
Gwen didn’t interrupt his account of that summer.
When he finished, she said, “I think you get to decide where we go next.”
Herb studied his map, calculating directions and distances.
“First Pergamon, then Dom, then Alexanderplatz. That avoids backtracking.”
“Such efficiency!” Gwen said, patting him on the arm.
“Hey, thanks for listening.”
He gave her a little hug. She looked surprised. He was tempted to ask her whether she had ever seen him touch a person who wasn’t a patient, but he knew the answer.