The Things We Cherished

  “Someday you’ll be able to. Things will be different here,” Henryk declared. Anneke looked at him. He was talking of political change, throwing off the rulers and institutions that kept them in this God-awful state of economic depression while their fellow Berliners flourished just miles away on the other side of the newly constructed Wall.

  But people in Anneke’s world did not dare to speak of such things. She had heard bits of conversation in the café, bold political statements made by Henryk’s friends or others like them. The remarks were always made with a touch of humor, though, just to make sure anyone who overheard—especially the Stasi agents and their spies, who were rumored to be everywhere—wouldn’t think they were serious. She generally attributed such talk to the beer and the bravado brought on by the anonymity of a large noisy room.

  Henryk wasn’t joking now though, and he didn’t seem the slightest bit drunk. He spoke clearly, breaking the silence of the darkened alleyway with his words.

  “What do you mean?” she ventured. Even the question felt daring, and it seemed as if the police might come and take them away at any second.

  “It hasn’t always been this way,” he said. “All of this,” he waved his hands around his head, as though swatting at flies, “is just a phase. Governments change all the time and sometimes even for the better.”

  Anneke paused to consider this. Though the present administration was all that she had ever known, she was aware on some level, of course, that there was a time before. When she had gone to school, the teachers made veiled references to the war and the previous regime from which the Red Army had liberated them. But despite the colorful picture painted by the textbooks, it always seemed to Anneke that bad was replaced by worse—in the past fifty years they had gone from losing a war to the Nazis to another defeat to the Communists. “How?” she asked.

  “The people have to make it happen,” he replied confidently. “We have to demand change.” A shiver passed through Anneke. People who spoke up like that wound up disappearing to who-knows-where, hushed whispers about their departure the only evidence they had been here at all. She had seen it with a printer whose name she had forgotten. Once when she had been at his shop picking up something for the Stossels, she had noticed him producing something else, a newspaper of some sort. She asked her mother about it later that night.

  “Best to mind our own business,” Bronia had said. And she was right, because two months later the printer was gone.

  A wave of admiration swept over her then. Henryk was so brave. She wanted to ask what the people had to do to bring about these changes. Surely sitting in bars talking wasn’t going to make things happen. But before she could speak, he ground out his cigarette. “I’ve got to go.” And he disappeared from the alley, leaving her to wonder if she had said something wrong, or if he had simply been bored.

  That night she trudged home to the apartment she shared with her mother. The housing estate where they lived had been one of the earliest rebuilding projects of the new government in the years after the war, and the twenty thousand units were quickly filled by Berliners weary of sharing cramped quarters with relatives in the housing shortages that plagued the city following the devastation of the bombing raids. The original plans had touted parks and playgrounds and other amenities. But the development had stagnated and the further improvements never came, and the land between the buildings remained barren and unpaved.

  Anneke navigated the wooden planks that formed a bridge over the thick sea of muddy earth, still thinking about her conversation with Henryk, recalling what he had said about things changing, the opportunity for a better life. She had contemplated such things herself, of course. She wanted more than a few odd jobs pasted together, enough money to make it until the next time she got paid. But when she tried to picture what that might look like, the image was murky and indiscernible. In her wildest dreams, she did something working with books, in a library or perhaps a shop. In truth, there was little prospect for someone with her limited background and nonexistent resources. The most she’d been raised to expect was marriage to someone practical, like a pipe fitter or factory worker, who earned a passable living. She’d seen enough, though, to know that raising a bunch of kids and waiting for a man who came home drunk or angry or not at all was not for her. She’d rather carry on as she was, alone.

  The next day Anneke awoke to another gray winter morning. Bronia snored loudly from the other room, having passed out on the sofa yet again. The two-room flat, its air heavy with stale cigarette smoke, seemed bleaker than ever. She looked out the cracked window at the endless sea of nondescript buildings in their apartment block, laundry hanging from the balconies like flags of all nations. A thin coating of snow, already gray and dirty, had fallen during the night. In the distance, a steel factory belched thick plumes of black smoke upward.

  As she passed through the living room on her way to the water closet, Anneke took in her sleeping mother, still dressed in a too-tight skirt from the previous night. She considered trying to wake her for work, then decided against it, knowing it would be impossible. Sadness rose in her. Bronia had not always been like this. Anneke remembered a time when her petite blonde mother was vivacious and pretty, with a soft voice and laugh that seemed to draw people to her, especially men. When Anneke was eight there had been one man, Peter, with a kind smile and handlebar mustache, who made her mother laugh often. He had taken them for picnics in the park each Sunday, giving Anneke bread to feed the ducks and showing her how to fly a kite. He had stayed longer than the others, almost a year. Bronia had said in a hushed voice that there might be a little brother or sister for her the following winter. But then Peter was gone, as quickly as he had come, and her mother never spoke of the baby again.

  There were others after that, men who shared vodka and watched television with her mother in the living room for a few weeks or months before disappearing. Most recently it had been a sinewy little man in a cheap suit who purported to work for some government agency. He could help them get a better flat, Bronia had bragged, if things went well. She always had such high hopes for the men she dated, even though they unfailingly broke her heart. Anneke disliked this one even more than most. She had not even bothered to learn his name.

  Anneke arrived at work early that morning, busying herself with the floors, dreading Frau Stossel’s inevitable questions about her mother’s tardiness. Today Frau Stossel did not even seem to notice, though, instead brushing by without speaking on her way out. She was always occupied by some luncheon or other social duty related to her husband’s position as a mid-ranking government official, or shuttling her twin sons, Karl and Klaus, to one of their young Communist pioneer meetings. Frau Stossel took her obligations seriously, pursuing them with an almost fervent zeal, more enthusiastically, it seemed, than her husband himself, who appeared content with the role of a rank-and-file bureaucrat.

  “I’m off to the queues,” Inge announced, stepping around Anneke as she knelt cleaning the floor to the entranceway.

  Anneke nodded. She had seen the lines outside the shops on Oranienburger Strasse on her way to work. They seemed to grow longer each day, people of various ages and backgrounds, women mostly, waiting to purchase whatever the stores had to offer. Whether they were hoping to procure meat or milk or a piece or two of fresh fruit, she did not know—and likely neither did they. If there were people in a queue, conventional wisdom held, then there was likely something worth waiting for on the other end, and one just hoped to get to the front before whatever it was ran out.

  When Inge had gone, Anneke paused to look around the foyer. The Stossels lived in a two-story row house, wider than those adjacent to it, with a wrought-iron balcony off the back of the second floor overlooking a small garden. It was situated on the edge of what had once been the Jewish quarter, now a fragment of its former self. The large synagogue around the corner still bore the scars of the war, the shattered glass and burned walls, its gutted insides untouched from more than two
decades ago. Because who had the money to fix a building like that when no one was going to use it?

  Of course, people seldom spoke openly about what had happened. The teachers and textbooks that mentioned the war said nothing of the Jews—that Anneke had learned in hushed whispers from her mother and other grown-ups she overheard when no one thought she was listening. Even if they hadn’t said anything, the past would have been impossible to ignore. The ghosts of the Jews were everywhere—in the shells of the synagogues, and the faint Hebrew writing that could still be seen above the stores that had once been kosher butcher shops and groceries.

  Some Jews remained in the city, but no one knew quite how many. A number of them had returned here from the camps, whether by choice or for lack of better options. Others, like Anneke’s mother, Bronia, had managed to hide and escape the Nazi dragnet. Anneke wasn’t sure how her mother had survived the war, and she’d learned long ago not to press for details. Even now, one did not publicize the fact that one was Jewish, the memories of what had happened still too fresh, the fear of losing one’s job or being otherwise penalized all too real. Only a small group of Orthodox Jews was still visible—they could be seen walking silently to and from the small room at the back of Becker’s hardware store that doubled as the shul, heads low, dutifully persistent in their observance. Anneke could not help but marvel that they had come back, in light of all that had happened. Wasn’t once in a lifetime enough?

  The Stossels’ house had once belonged to Jews, Anneke could tell by the faint impression that still remained in the doorway where the prayer box had once hung. She wondered who they were, what had become of them. Had they been able to escape? And once, when she was putting away clothes for Frau Stossel, she had found a gold chain bearing a Hebrew letter taped to the bottom of one of the dresser drawers. This surprised her—she had not imagined that the Stossels had the Jewish family’s furniture as well. Perhaps the previous owners had left in a hurry, unable to take anything with them at all. She looked around the bedroom as if seeing everything for the first time. Had Frau Stossel’s fur coat, indeed the very clothes on her back, once belonged to someone else? Anneke had tucked the necklace in her pocket. It wasn’t stealing from the Stossels, she’d reasoned. They had already taken enough.

  When the floors had been polished, Anneke retreated to the study under pretense of dusting. It was her favorite room in the Stossels’ house, dark wood bookshelves wrapping around the walls and climbing to the ceiling. She wiped the lower shelves with a cloth, studying the works of Lenin and Marx that any good party official should have. Then she looked longingly at the overflowing upper shelves where the real treasures lay. The first time she had climbed the stepladder to clean the dusty tomes, she was amazed to discover a trove of Western literature, Twain and Hemingway and Faulkner, books now considered risky to have in one’s possession. Studying their worn covers, she felt certain they had belonged to the previous occupants, read a hundred times each before being reluctantly left behind. Sometimes when she was sure that Frau Stossel would not be home for several hours, Anneke would pull one of the books from the shelf, holding the dustrag aloft as she read in case anyone walked into the room.

  When five o’clock came that day, Anneke left the Stossels’ and set out directly for the bar without stopping home. Outside the air was damp, a sign that more snow was imminent. She drew her coat more tightly around her, feeling the thin spots at the elbows. There wouldn’t be money to get another, even a secondhand one like this, from the Saturday market until next year.

  A lone goose honked overhead. Anneke peered upward in the semidarkness. Had the bird been left behind by the flock somehow or purposely gone its own way, resisting the mandate to migrate south for the winter?

  That night, Henryk appeared in the alley behind the bar once more. “Would you like to see a film?” he asked casually, as though ordering another beer inside. “When you aren’t working, I mean?”

  Anneke hesitated, left nearly speechless by the invitation. “Y-yes. Tomorrow is my day off.”

  They met in front of the bar the following evening, and as they navigated from pavement to street between a row of tightly parked Wartburgs and Trabants, Henryk took her hand and tucked it under his arm. Anneke felt a surge of excitement, not minding that it was too soon for him to be taking such liberties, or that he should have at least asked first. She hoped he could not feel the knots where she’d stitched over the holes in her gloves.

  The movie was a long Russian film with subtitles that had too many characters and subplots for Anneke to follow. Shortly after the opening credits rolled, Henryk kissed her, his cheek rough against her own, and she responded as well as she knew how. She shivered as Henryk’s hand stroked her shoulder, then dropped lower. The grope, her first, seemed harmless enough. But when his hand traveled from her knee to her skirt, she pushed it away. She had seen enough from her mother to learn the consequences of headstrong love, and that having a child with no more than this was a recipe for poverty and a dead-end life. She wanted something better.

  Anneke wondered if Henryk would avoid her after she rebuffed his advances, but he appeared again in the alley the next night as though nothing had happened. He told her that he lived in Köpenick, a district Anneke had seen through the window of the train on one of the few occasions when she and her mother had ventured out of the city. She vaguely recalled seeing a neighborhood of solid, slightly better than middle-class houses and a park with children that looked like it would have been a fun place to play.

  “Not that I’m staying there much longer.” Her eyes widened. Did he mean to move out of his parents’ house? Apartments were scarce these days and it was almost impossible to get approved for a flat unless you were married and had a family. “I’m going to get out of Berlin,” he added.

  An overwhelming sense of loss slammed into her stomach like a rock. Though they had known each other for only a short time, Henryk had quickly become part of the fabric of her life, their meetings the one bright spot in her dreary days.

  “Where will you go?” she asked, managing to keep her tone neutral.

  He shrugged. “Paris, most likely.” Her breath caught. When he spoke of leaving, she’d imagined Dresden or one of the other cities in the east. In her wildest dreams, she had never conceived of escaping this godforsaken country altogether. Paris was epic. “I can pursue my writing there,” he added.

  What kept him from writing here? “When?” she asked instead.

  “In a few weeks, as soon as I can make arrangements.”

  Marvel mixed with envy as Anneke considered his plan. The notion of leaving Berlin seemed unfathomable. Once it had been relatively easy to cross over the border. She’d had a classmate, Ruta, whose brother had done it and promised to bring her over and get her a job as soon as she graduated. But then a few months ago the Wall had begun to go up, and suddenly it was as if the western side of the city was another planet. Anneke pictured the dense barbed wire, the thick blocks of concrete that were being erected with alarming speed. How could Henryk possibly hope to get across?

  “If I can get through the Wall to the south of the city, I know people who can help,” he said, seeming to read her thoughts. “But it has to be soon.” She nodded. The fortifications were growing day by day, permanent cement slabs replacing temporary wire, and she had heard talk that there would soon be not just the physical barrier but a wide swath of guarded land between east and west in order to deter anyone who might try to sneak across.

  She wanted to ask what had happened to changing things here, the people forcing their government to reform. Surely he couldn’t do that from Paris.

  “Anneke,” Herr Ders called from inside, interrupting their conversation. She turned and walked back into the bar, trying to breathe over the lump in her chest. A few minutes later, Henryk came back in through the front door of the café, but she did not look up or meet his eyes, certain that he would be able to see her dismay.

  Later that night, she lay aw
ake in the flat, trying not to hear her mother snore off the half bottle of vodka she’d consumed earlier. Other than occasionally being late for work, Bronia was a functional drunk. She seldom became angry or morose—liquor was just part of her diet, like coffee for other people.

  Anneke rolled onto her side, facing the wall. So Henryk was leaving, just like all of the men her mother knew. Well, what had she expected? Not a future together—an evening at the movies and a quick grope hardly bespoke that kind of commitment. But she’d pictured Henryk as a constant somehow, his nightly presence the promise of something better.

  Henryk did not return to the café the next evening or the one after and a deep pit formed low in Anneke’s stomach as she wondered if he had already gone. But then on the third night he appeared again, looking the same as ever. He even ventured a slight smile in her direction, and when he stepped outside to smoke she found an excuse to return to the alley.

  He made no attempt to explain his absence. “You haven’t told anyone, have you?” he asked straightaway, and she knew he was talking about Paris.

  She shook her head. “Of course not. I thought you might have left,” she confessed.

  “Not yet. But the plans have come together sooner than I expected. I’m going in two days’ time.” So her instincts about a more imminent departure had not been wrong. Her heart sank.

  “Meet me later?” he asked. There was a deeper meaning to his words and she could tell that this time he meant not just for a movie.