When We Danced on Water by Evan Fallenberg Page B

pointing. “Lead the way,” she said, “it’s a deal.”
    Peter, he was called, or Hans-Peter if you insisted. He had been raised in Leipzig but had come to Berlin in the summer of 1961, when rumors of plans to seal off the West from the East were rife. He had tried to convince his aging mother to come with him but she insisted he go alone, and so he crossed quite undramatically into West Berlin and never saw her again. He told Vivi he had been twenty years old when he had crossed over, so she figured he was in his mid-forties by now.
    â€œLucky for me I wasn’t born any earlier than I was,” he said, a whipped cream mustache foaming on his upper lip, “or the Nazis would have experimented on me for sure.” He looked down into his cup and Vivi thought he might start to cry. There was a teaspoon next to his mug but Peter preferred stirring his cocoa with his finger and sucking off the cream and the chocolate. Vivi found him highly amusing, and safe, like a grown-up child.
    â€œWhat is it like in the East?” she asked, taking a sip of her own hot chocolate.
    â€œWell I don’t know anymore firsthand, of course, but I have a pretty good idea. Lots of parades and marches, power shortages, speeches. No good television—I love television!—no pineapples, no fancy clothes or sports cars. Lots of rationing.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if to inform her he had said all there was to say about East Germany. She waited for more but Peter was busy with the bun she had ordered.
    With a mouthful of bread Peter said, “You walk a lot around here, along the wall, I’ve seen you. This area is my territory. Every once in a while someone manages to escape from the East into West Berlin and I am always hoping he’ll drop down the wall right in my sector. I’ve had a few, two actually, a chap from Berlin and another from a tiny village near Leipzig. He spoke the same dialect as me, even knew my mother’s little newsstand. He’s married now, living in Spandau.” Peter drained his mug and licked the chocolatey rim. “I can show you around the neighborhood if you like.”
    Vivi paid and the two were out in the street. The sun had come out and suddenly the ice and snow shone brightly in the light, blinding her. Peter seemed unaffected.
    That day he showed her one small street in his territory, one small street that she might have happened past a dozen times and never noticed, for it was unremarkable in every way: a short and narrow lane of insignificant buildings that dead-ended at the wall. But Peter brought the street alive for the entirety of its seven-hundred-year existence. He told of princes who had slept or dueled there, merchants who had prospered and failed, a patrician family who had used their roof garden for several suicide jumps stretched over three generations. He told of East Germans who had plunged from the wall to the street, a single bullet through the neck. And he told of Jews, Jews tortured or beaten or chased.
    Vivi was riveted. She stayed with Peter in the street until she could no longer feel her fingers or toes. She met him the next day, and the next. She learned his likes and dislikes, and took pains to pack lunches he might enjoy, since she could not afford to invite him for hot chocolate and buns every day of the week.
    Peter showed her the real Berlin and its ghost. He pointed out where the jazz clubs had flourished, where prostitutes and pimps had gathered. Together they stood at the site of Europe’s first traffic light, in Potsdamer Platz, or they trekked paths that pursued and frightened Berliners had used to stay clear of the marauding Soviets at the end of the war. Peter taught Vivi to see Berlin in layers, like a woman with countless rustling petticoats, each concealing secrets large and small. He was clearly both in love with and appalled by his adopted city.
    This was the parallel Berlin she had sensed was still