Tübigen or Heidelberg and knocking around assorted European capitals? It was the last time I ever made a deliberately careerist decision, and it was one which taught me a lesson: whenever the choice was between doing something practical and self-advancing or the chance to disappear out of town, always go with the latter decision.
Now—as if to prove that point once more—I had again slammed the door on the life I was leading and jumped a plane heading eastward. After we touched down and dealt with the attendant frontier formalities in Frankfurt, I boarded another flight venturing even farther east. Less than an hour later, I peered out the window. There it was, directly below us.
The Wall.
As the plane dipped its wings and began to circle over the eastern front of Berlin, that long, snaking concrete edifice became more defined. Even from this high altitude, it was so formidable, so severe, so conclusive. Before the clouds broke and The Wall became a scenic reality, we had spent the previous thirty minutes bouncing through turbulence over German Democratic Republic airspace, brought about (as the American pilot explained) by having to fly at just 10,000 feet over this foreign country.
“They worry that if the commercial planes fly any higher,” the woman next to me said, “they’ll engage in surveillance. For the enemy. Who is everyone outside the Warsaw Pact and the ‘fraternal brotherhood’ of fellow socialist prison camps, like Cuba, Albania, North Korea . . .”
I looked at this woman. She was in her early fifties—dressed in a severe suit, slightly heavy in the face, puffing away on an HB cigarette (the pack displayed on the armrest between us), her eyes reflecting a tired intelligence; someone, I sensed immediately, who had seen a great many things she would have preferred not to have seen.
“And might you have had experience of such a prison?” I asked.
“What makes you think that?” she asked, taking a deep long drag off her cigarette.
“Just a hunch.”
She stubbed out her cigarette and reached for another, telling me:
“I know they will put on the no-smoking sign in two minutes, but I can never fly over this place and not light up. It’s almost Pavlovian.”
“So when did you get out?”
“Thirteen August, 1961. Hours before they sealed all the borders and began to build that ‘Antifascist Detection Device’ you see below you.”
“How did you know you had to leave?”
“You ask a lot of questions. And your German isn’t bad. You a journalist?”
“No, just someone who asks a lot of questions.”
She paused for a moment, giving me a quizzical look, wondering if she could trust me with whatever she was about to say, yet also very much wanting to impart her story to me.
“You want a real cigarette?” she asked, noticing that I was rolling yet another one on top of my Olivetti typewriter case.
“That would be nice.”
“Fancy typewriter,” she said.
“A going-away gift.”
“From whom?”
“My father.”
On the night before my departure, I’d arranged to see Dad at his favorite “Jap joint,” as he called the Japanese restaurant he frequently patronized in the Forties off Lexington Avenue. While there he threw back three saka-tinis (a martini make with sake), then asked the waiter to get him something he’d left in the cloakroom. He ended up presenting me with a fountain pen and a fancy new red Olivetti typewriter, an emblematic piece of modern Italian design. I was both thrown by his generosity and impressed by his good taste. But when I told him this, he just laughed and said:
“Doris—the broad I’m banging right now—she picked it out. Said a published writer like you needs a swanky machine like this one. Know what I told her? ‘One day I gotta read my kid’s book.’”
Suddenly he flinched, knowing he’d just revealed something he would have preferred to not have revealed.
“Shit, did I say something stupid or what?” he asked.
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“It’s just the
Now—as if to prove that point once more—I had again slammed the door on the life I was leading and jumped a plane heading eastward. After we touched down and dealt with the attendant frontier formalities in Frankfurt, I boarded another flight venturing even farther east. Less than an hour later, I peered out the window. There it was, directly below us.
The Wall.
As the plane dipped its wings and began to circle over the eastern front of Berlin, that long, snaking concrete edifice became more defined. Even from this high altitude, it was so formidable, so severe, so conclusive. Before the clouds broke and The Wall became a scenic reality, we had spent the previous thirty minutes bouncing through turbulence over German Democratic Republic airspace, brought about (as the American pilot explained) by having to fly at just 10,000 feet over this foreign country.
“They worry that if the commercial planes fly any higher,” the woman next to me said, “they’ll engage in surveillance. For the enemy. Who is everyone outside the Warsaw Pact and the ‘fraternal brotherhood’ of fellow socialist prison camps, like Cuba, Albania, North Korea . . .”
I looked at this woman. She was in her early fifties—dressed in a severe suit, slightly heavy in the face, puffing away on an HB cigarette (the pack displayed on the armrest between us), her eyes reflecting a tired intelligence; someone, I sensed immediately, who had seen a great many things she would have preferred not to have seen.
“And might you have had experience of such a prison?” I asked.
“What makes you think that?” she asked, taking a deep long drag off her cigarette.
“Just a hunch.”
She stubbed out her cigarette and reached for another, telling me:
“I know they will put on the no-smoking sign in two minutes, but I can never fly over this place and not light up. It’s almost Pavlovian.”
“So when did you get out?”
“Thirteen August, 1961. Hours before they sealed all the borders and began to build that ‘Antifascist Detection Device’ you see below you.”
“How did you know you had to leave?”
“You ask a lot of questions. And your German isn’t bad. You a journalist?”
“No, just someone who asks a lot of questions.”
She paused for a moment, giving me a quizzical look, wondering if she could trust me with whatever she was about to say, yet also very much wanting to impart her story to me.
“You want a real cigarette?” she asked, noticing that I was rolling yet another one on top of my Olivetti typewriter case.
“That would be nice.”
“Fancy typewriter,” she said.
“A going-away gift.”
“From whom?”
“My father.”
On the night before my departure, I’d arranged to see Dad at his favorite “Jap joint,” as he called the Japanese restaurant he frequently patronized in the Forties off Lexington Avenue. While there he threw back three saka-tinis (a martini make with sake), then asked the waiter to get him something he’d left in the cloakroom. He ended up presenting me with a fountain pen and a fancy new red Olivetti typewriter, an emblematic piece of modern Italian design. I was both thrown by his generosity and impressed by his good taste. But when I told him this, he just laughed and said:
“Doris—the broad I’m banging right now—she picked it out. Said a published writer like you needs a swanky machine like this one. Know what I told her? ‘One day I gotta read my kid’s book.’”
Suddenly he flinched, knowing he’d just revealed something he would have preferred to not have revealed.
“Shit, did I say something stupid or what?” he asked.
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“It’s just the
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