Although a united people were celebrating all around her, she remained unconvinced that life wouldn’t return to normal when the sun rose. As if Giles could read her thoughts, he took her in his arms and said, “It’s all over, my darling. You can turn the page. The nightmare has finally come to an end.”
An East German officer appeared from nowhere and barked out an order. The soldiers shouldered their weapons and marched off, which caused an even louder roar of approval. While everyone around them danced, drank, and sang ecstatically, Giles and Karin made their way slowly through the crowd toward the graffiti-covered wall, on top of which hundreds of revelers were dancing, as if it were the grave of a hated foe.
Karin stopped and touched Giles’s arm when she spotted an old man hugging a young woman. It was clear that, like so many people on that unforgettable night, they were finally being reunited after twenty-eight years apart. Laughter, joy, and celebration were mingled with tears, as the old man clung onto the granddaughter he had thought he would never meet.
“I want to stand on top of the wall,” declared Karin.
Giles looked up at the twelve-foot-high monument commemorating failure, on which hundreds of young people were having a party. He decided it wasn’t the moment to remind his wife that he was nearly seventy. This was a night for shedding y
ears.
“Great idea,” he said.
When they reached the foot of the wall, Giles suddenly knew what Edmund Hillary must have felt when faced with the final ascent of Everest, but two young Sherpas, who had just descended, cupped their hands and made the first rung of a ladder, so he could take their place on the summit. He couldn’t quite make it, but two other young revelers reached down and yanked him up to join them.
Karin joined him a moment later and they stood, side by side, staring across the border. She was still unwilling to believe she wouldn’t wake up and find it was all a dream. Some East Germans were attempting to climb up from the other side, and Karin stretched down to offer a young girl a hand. Giles took a photograph of the two women, who’d never met before, hugging each other as if they were old friends. A photograph that would end up on their mantelpiece in Smith Square to commemorate the day East and West returned to sanity.
From their lofty position, Giles and Karin watched a flood of people flowing downstream to freedom, while the guards, who only the night before would have shot anyone attempting to cross the border, just stood and stared, unable to comprehend what was happening all around them.
Karin was finally beginning to believe that the genie had escaped from the communist bottle, but it took her another hour to summon up the courage to say to Giles, “I want to show you where I lived.”
Giles found the descent from the wall almost as difficult as clambering up it had been, but with the help of several outstretched hands, he somehow managed it, though he needed to catch his breath once his feet had touched the ground.
Karin took his hand and they battled against a one-way stampede of human traffic as she led him slowly toward the border post. Thousands of men, women, and children, carrying bags, suitcases, even pushing prams laden with their life’s possessions, were heading in one direction, leaving their old lives behind, clearly unwilling to consider returning in case they should find themselves trapped once again.
After they’d passed under the red and white barrier and left the West, Giles and Karin joined a trickle of citizens who were heading in the same direction as themselves. Karin hesitated, but only for a moment, when they passed the second barrier and found themselves on East German soil.
There were no border guards, no snarling Alsatians, no thin-lipped officials to check that their visas were in order. Just an eerie, unoccupied wilderness.
There were also no taxi queues, as there were no taxis. They passed a little group of East Germans kneeling in silent prayer, in memory of those who’d sacrificed their lives to make today possible.
The two of them continued to weave their way through the crowds that were melting away with each step they took. It was well over an hour before Karin finally stopped and pointed toward a group of identical gray tenement buildings that stood in a grim line, reminding her of a past life she’d almost forgotten.
“This is where you lived?”
She looked up and said, “The nineteenth floor, second window on the left is where I spent the first twenty-four years of my life.”
Giles counted until he reached a tiny curtainless window on the nineteenth floor, second from the left, and couldn’t help recalling where he’d spent the first twenty-four years of his life: Barrington Hall, a townhouse in London, the castle in Scotland in which he spent a few weeks every summer, and then of course there was always the villa in Tuscany should he need a break.
“Do you want to go up and see who’s living there now?” he asked.
“No,” said Karin firmly. “I want to go home.”
Without another word, she turned her back on the towering blocks of gray concrete and joined those of her countrymen who were heading toward the West, to experience a freedom that she had never taken for granted.
She didn’t once look back as they walked toward the border, although a moment of anxiety returned as they approached the crossing point, but it quickly evaporated when she saw some of the guards, jackets unbuttoned, collars loosened, dancing with their newly made friends, no longer from East or West, now simply Germans.
Once they had passed under the barrier and were back in the West, they found young and old alike attempting, with sledgehammers, crowbars, chisels, and even a nail file, to dismantle the eight-hundred-mile-long monstrosity piece by piece. The physical symbol of what Winston Churchill had described as the Iron Curtain.
Giles unzipped his bag, took out the hammer, and handed it to Karin.
“You first, my darling.”
EMMA CLIFTON
1990–1992
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