The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  Being blessed with those state-ordained wide-open spaces, the eastern borderlands were also home to an irksome abundance of airborne insects. As dusk approached they would flock to EV13 like moths to a rustic bike path, garnishing my every inhalation with wings and legs and spattering me horribly on the descents, like flung handfuls of boiled rice. On one such late afternoon, my phone buzzed while I was palming thorax pulp off my thighs at the foot of a big green hill. A text message: two of my oldest friends had arrived in Berlin to stay with a third who lived there, and were asking if I wished to join them for a halfway spot of rest and recuperation.

  I frowned pensively at the screen, smeared an aphid across my cheek, gazed around at the plump and empty hillsides, then thought: Yeah, all right. And with that I pedalled into a lazy sunset with the invigorated air of a man about to get drunk for four days, and who doesn’t yet know that there’s a national rail strike on, which will require him to spend one of them cycling very soberly all the way to Hamburg, then lashing his bike to the back of a long-distance coach.

  On 21 September 1990, my wife and I crossed from Poland into what was still – just – the GDR, our passports stamped with a treasured Cold War souvenir by a demob-happy old border guard, offloading a good thirty years’ worth of pent-up smiling. We bumped onwards through the East German night down a Nazi-era concrete-slab motorway and hit West Berlin, our journal records, at 4.45 a.m. What a thrilling shock to the system after weeks of grey, washed-out meagreness, of dumplings and cratered streets that died after dark. In East Berlin people were shuffling groggily out to work. Across what was left of the Wall, they were shuffling groggily back to bed. Swept up by this manic, cosmopolitan blurt of twenty-four-hour neon decadence we went to the Intercontinental Hotel to cash a traveller’s cheque – what a gigantic pain those things were – then proceeded directly to an all-night café-bar and ordered a meal whose written description is smudged by my wife’s grateful tears: ‘Fresh rolls, parma ham, watermelon balls on a bed of ice cubes, brought to us by an enormous gay punk.’ We slept in the car for two hours, and then did something I still can’t quite believe.

  A couple of weeks earlier, a sighting of another copy of Comrade Shoestring on a neighbouring Polish breakfast table had led us into conversation with an expansive American named Ron. He’d just come from Berlin, and had stayed there in an apartment belonging to a journalist called Werner who was currently abroad: ‘I don’t know him at all, it was a friend-of-a-friend thing. An old guy next door has the key, Herr Dumke. If you can sweet-talk him I’d recommend it.’ Can you imagine? We tutted for days after at Ron’s shamelessness. But our morals were clearly loosened by exhaustion and the reckless Berlin vibe, because off we drove to the appointed low-rise apartment block and knocked up Old Man Dumke.

  Having made the mistake of passing her German O level, my wife did the talking. Her words were few and none of them diminished the craggy Herr Dumke’s towering scepticism; an already painful situation took an agonising turn when another passing resident butted into our doorstep negotiations in fluent English. ‘But Werner is almost more than a friend to us,’ I heard myself tell him. ‘Really sort of a brother. And what a journalist. We keep all Werner’s articles in a special red box.’ The resident nodded, then exchanged words for a series of elaborate scoffing sounds with Herr Dumke. ‘He tells me that Werner is the last name of his neighbour. Your sort-of-a-brother’s first name in fact is Johannes.’ How very pleased he looked. Perhaps too pleased, because to everyone’s astonishment Herr Dumke immediately snatched a key from his hallway shelf and dropped it into my wife’s hand.

  We stayed there for two nights, ringing JW’s lovely bath with accumulated Communism and staining his sofa with sweet-and-sour sauce during takeaway-lapped evenings before his massive TV. Then we belatedly came to our senses, and checked into a suburban campsite before our friend three times removed whistled in through his front door and forced us into a Goldilocks-pattern escape.

  The campsite backed onto the Berlin Wall – away from the city centre, its 155km perimeter remained largely intact – and I was thrilled when our tent-neighbours, two young British miners, led me to a man-sized cleft someone had battered through it. The barbed wire had been removed from the yawning swathe of death-strip behind, but the watchtowers and searchlights were still in place, along with the patrol paths and a wide ribbon of footprint-spotting sand. ‘Just think of all the people who were killed right here,’ mused one of the miners, though in fact not that many had been – fewer than a hundred would-be escapees were shot dead trying to cross the GDR’s best-defended border, typically young men acting on a drunken whim.

  The miners had driven their Morris Ital all the way from Durham to pay homage to history and its victims. It was the first time either of them had left the country, and they were always getting lost. ‘I know I’m laughing, because you’ve got to laugh, see, or else you’ll cry,’ said one after a five-hour return drive to the campsite from the city’s Reichstag museum. ‘And I can’t be crying.’ Yet they remained endlessly moved by their pilgrimage, and one night read us a poem they’d written at Checkpoint Charlie, which I regret to confess is unkindly reviewed in our journal.

  On Christmas Eve 1989, the iconic Brandenburg Gate was opened after forty years marooned in no man’s land: one of our friends jumped in his car and drove all the way to Berlin, and when we watched the New Year’s Eve celebrations on telly, there he was on top of it, cavorting amongst the mulleted throng. Ten months on that inebriated headiness still hung in the air, and my wife and I spent a slightly dizzy few days trying to process Berlin’s chaotic changing of the guard. Enterprising East Germans had turned their front rooms into bars and cafés. Poles hawked Russian vodka and hunks of demolished wall on trestle tables. Every street was home to a scatter of abandoned Trabants the colour of brown coal and concrete, and Checkpoint Charlie had been smashed to pieces. Then the weather took a tent-unfriendly turn for the worse, and a department-store cashier snapped my credit card in two before my eyes. It seemed a very New Berlin cue to move on.

  I suppose we thought that soon everywhere in Eastern Europe would be like Berlin, but if we did we were wrong. In fact, Berlin wasn’t like anywhere else even then, and still isn’t today – least of all like anywhere else in Germany. Throughout my halfway mini-break, my friends and I were surrounded by hip young urbanites in a completely mullet-frei environment. It must be the world capital of bearded vaping. Everyone I met worked in new media or music, or said they did – whenever we invited people to come out for brunch or an early-evening beer they seemed suspiciously available. In Peep Show terms, Berlin is a city of Jeremys marooned in a nation of Marks. My friends and I awkwardly straddled both camps, drinking at lunchtime, mooching about parks with kebabs in hand, then photographing war memorials and staying up until 8.45 a.m. to audit the ongoing British general election with our reading glasses pressed to a data-wall of screens.

  They were all rather taken aback by my appearance, with especial reference to an advanced state of emaciation – I now weighed less than I did when we’d all left school – and that blistered, plum-nosed wino tan. The MIFA’s all-round poxy tininess was if anything a greater shock. All three of them had a quick go up the crowded pavement and two nearly came to grief, scattering hipsters into the gutter. None could even begin to understand how I had successfully ridden this thing so very, very far. Watching the slapstick struggles of my closest peers I could have almost doubted it myself. Almost. In truth, I’ve always been a significantly more impressive character than any of them, in one case embarrassingly so.

  On my final full day we took the MIFA – by tram – to the fabled Russian war memorial in Treptower Park, a last enclave of Soviet ceremonial might. Having passed through Gdan´sk, where the war started, I was keen to visit the place that more compellingly than any other marked its European end. I had imagined us pushing my bike across forsaken granite parade grounds drifted with last year’s leaves, and was therefore more than slig
htly surprised to find the approaching streets noisily alive with people and honking cars. The surprise was magnified when it became clear that the crowds surging in through the park’s monumental gates were almost exclusively Russian, many waving national flags old and new. Somehow – let’s blame the brain-draining horror of George Osborne’s triumphant smirk – I had completely failed to grasp that this visit coincided with the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day.

  Inside, the grounds were filled with babushka folk songs and traditional costume. The grassy slopes up to the colossal centrepiece statue – a sword-wielding Red Army hero with a rescued child in his arms and a splintered swastika under a mighty bronze boot – lay buried under scarlet bouquets and banners. Where had all these Russians come from, and who had brought them here? KGB Major V. Putin had been stationed in Dresden for five years when the Wall fell, and as an unusually fervent Soviet loyalist must have been shattered by the experience. Putin has claimed that when a mob gathered around his office – directly opposite the city’s Stasi HQ – he strode out brandishing a revolver and repelled them singlehanded. ‘This is Soviet territory and you’re standing on our border,’ he quotes himself shouting. ‘I’m serious when I say that I will shoot trespassers!’ That’s his story. In mine he dresses up as a nun, hides in a cupboard and wets himself. But Vlad’s version of the truth is probably more significant than the reality: let us just agree that in the context of his formative experiences in the service of a doomed empire and its showpiece colony, here is a man with issues.

  By an accident happy or otherwise, we had pitched up at Treptower Park on the most auspicious Berlin day since the Wall came down. Perhaps in the memorial’s entire history, for the unregulated public celebration around us bore no resemblance to the GDR era’s dourly regimented Victory Day parades, depicted in archive photographs dotted about the grounds. It was a most confusing spectacle, and I struggled to distribute my emotions proportionately. Sympathy, of course, for the 80,000 Soviet troops who died in the house-to-house Battle of Berlin, a futile end-game tragedy with Hitler already bunkered down on his sofa with Eva B and a cocked pistol. Relief for a city – a nation, a continent, a planet – saved from Nazism; we saw a banner in German thanking their Russian liberators in these precise terms. But also a distinct unease at the mood of tub-thumping Russian patriotism, a far cry from the sombre, lest-we-forget Cenotaph vibe, which implanted a suspicion that the crowds were here not just to mourn those who died defeating Hitler, but their resurgent nation’s recent conquest of Crimea, however notionally indirect.

  For the elderly Berliners out here in the eastern suburbs, how strange it must have felt to see their overlords parading the streets once more. Not just rubbing their noses in those stinky old Stasi memories, but reminding them once again that all this was their own fault, for starting a really terrible war and losing it. Awk-ward! In the weeks ahead I would often wonder if the joy of unification had been tempered by Germany’s difficult history: hooray, we’re all together again, let’s relive those special days when we were last one big happ … Actually, let’s not do that.

  But there wasn’t a hint of trouble with the Russians, because Berlin is a city of well-trained amnesiacs. It’s easier to forget than forgive. That evening we went to a bar that told its long history in a multilingual wall chart, beginning in 1500 and proceeding in regular instalments until Mrs Muller took over behind the beer taps in 1927. Then a conspicuous void before 1989, when the director Sergio Leone popped in for a pint. This was a city with an awful lot of bad shit to gloss over, and the Return of the Russians simply called for another coat of mental whitewash. Most locals I talked to even struggled to remember exactly where the wall had run. I can only assume I was infected, because on Sunday afternoon I pulled the MIFA off a train at Boizenburg, pedalled tentatively out through the lengthening, small-town shadows and wondered what on earth I was up to.

  ‘Hello, I am sorry to say this but you are late.’

  It was 7.30 p.m., and I had very recently established that the River Elbe was not, as my maps implied, crossed at this lonely point by a bridge, but by a ferry which had stopped running ninety minutes previously. I was in the old East, and the only hotels across a generous radius lay in Hitzacker, in the old West, whose half-timbered homes sat soaking up the last golden rays of sunset across the spangled water. Since setting off I’d only had a single rest day prior to the Berlin Hiatus; how difficult it was to readjust my mind and body after a ninety-six-hour reboot. I rejoined the route wearing civvies, and in body and soul felt like I ought to be pootling blearily home from a friend’s house after an all-nighter. Instead, I had ridden 42km with a vestigial hangover while wodges of underpant inveigled themselves into every tender fold and valley; now I learned that hitting the sack in Hitzacker would require an additional 35km round trip via a definite actual bridge, a prospect that caused me to desecrate this peaceful and becoming scene with an unhinged Viking battle roar. This had attracted the attention of a tubby old gent in socks and sandals, who pattered up the jetty and responded with undeserved temperance.

  What followed should be a lesson to all travellers in need: deafening self-pity is your friend. The old man beckoned me to follow him down to the water’s edge, where a battered little tin dinghy bobbed among the reeds. He clambered in, relieved it of several bucketfuls of brown water and on the fifth attempt tugged the outboard motor into smoky, spluttering life. ‘Please,’ he shouted, holding out an oily hand. I heaved the MIFA in then followed it, and off we buzzed through the sunlit, lightly misted waters, across what for most of his life had been the most fiercely defended, lethal stretch of aquatic no man’s land in the whole of Europe. The GDR operated a fleet of thirty high-speed patrol boats to police the Elbe’s share of the border, captained by men in leather trench coats who thought nothing of mowing down west-bound swimmers. More than 200 East Germans died trying to cross frontier rivers.

  My ferryman deposited me at Hitzacker’s quayside; I offered him effusive thanks and a crumpled ten-euro note. He frowned at this evidently unanticipated reward for a while, then swept it into his pocket and said: ‘If you are here again, and ferry is finish, you know where is my boat.’ An hour before, struggling to relearn the art of long-term leg rotation, I wondered if I’d ever reacclimatise to life on EV13. An hour later, sitting behind a kalbsschnitzel the size of a MIFA wheel in a dining-room filled with murmuring pensioners, it was as if I’d never been away.

  *

  I followed the broad, lazy Elbe and its successors for a bright and blustery few days, criss-crossing from east to west on a succession of ferries. With the river largely out of bounds, the dead-end settlements on either side had withered dramatically in the Cold War years; one or two especially vulnerable towns on the eastern bank had been entirely walled in like pocket Berlins, to deter escapees. A few late-era observation towers survived and I climbed up one, a 10m stub of concrete with a row of metal-framed windows round the top. It was predictably cheerless in there: cramped, bleak and cold, with streaked and greasy views of the sunlit realm of free-roaming plenty it was nominally built to monitor. You’d imagine that the 47,000-odd GDR border guards who sat cooped up for long and miserable years in places like this must routinely have hatched schemes to flee to that tantalising promised land, and you’d be right. More than 2,500 border troops escaped, despite (or perhaps because of) a rolling programme of ideological indoctrination that filled an extraordinary 50 per cent of their training schedule.

  My favourite related story was that of Jürgen Lange, a teenage border guard on national service. One night in May 1969, patrolling a remote and mountainous stretch of death-strip with his sergeant – guards were never trusted out alone – Lange watched in horror as the older man suddenly scooted off and began to shin up the last-line mesh fence. Border troops were under strict orders to shoot to kill in these situations, and had no excuse for missing: all had passed an advanced marksmanship test requiring them to hit two moving targets with four shots at a ran
ge of 200m, by day or night. At least thirty-seven guards were fatally gunned down by colleagues in the act of escape. On dutiful reflex, Lange raised his rifle; then lowered it, and watched the sergeant drop down and disappear into the darkened land of opportunity. He himself had never even thought about escaping, but having failed to shoot his errant colleague knew he’d now face imprisonment and a lifetime of menial disgrace. After an agonising ten minutes, Lange set off in the sergeant’s footsteps. When the West Germans picked him up and took away his gun, they found it wouldn’t fire: the sergeant had taken the precaution of disabling it before the pair went out on patrol.

  Calves and foals were stumbling about and meadows were being mown; nesting storks spread their impressive wings atop every other chimney and telegraph pole. A tireless headwind chased painterly white clouds across the blue sky and sent me down into a crouch, the MIFA’s chorus of groans and shrieks singing through the frame at close quarters. With starvation and violent death a less pressing concern these days, I had to make do with a cocktail of humdrum irritants. Why (oh why oh why) had the proprietors of even the humblest guest house subscribed to that inexplicable fashion for topping their every bed with an artful cairn of decorative pillows? It was impossible to relocate these plump stupidities anywhere that didn’t result in a nocturnal pratfall and a faceful of beaded velvet. And why did hotel curtains never quite meet? I was forever coming to in the small hours with a piercing shaft of streetlight playing across my face, and had a recurring dream at the end of which I woke up in a shop window.