When the Place Is a Map, and the Map Is a Maze (2)

An invisible hero story

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In Part 1, Peter lands in a place that after all the years still isn’t making much sense to him. His local guide, Mona, takes him first to a Parliament session, then to an out-of-the-world café.

What you took for a ceiling must have been a one-piece (as far as I could discern) canopy, about a foot narrower than the real ceiling on each side, letting the light brim over. The canopy was shockingly painted as in those churches or palaces, real artsy, with skies and puffy clouds and a huge glowing sun in the centre, which looked as if that was where the light came from.

The immediate eye-catcher though was a tree arching over half the room. An amazing green Gestalt.

Under this tree, which you felt like reaching out to touch and check out if it was real, a few tiny round tables for two.

We sat down. You found yourself inevitably very close to your companion and an unhomely – unheimlich – uncanny air of privacy set in. Mona placed her elbows on the table, shoulders arched and bent forward to me, eyes sparkling with excitement.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Interesting. Never been anywhere quite like that before.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. Anyway, let’s order something and plan ahead.”

As if conjured up by her words, a tall waiter stood by my elbow, face behind his tablet. I went with Mona’s choice, to keep things simple.

“I just got it confirmed that we’ve got invitations to the British Film Festival opening tonight.”

“British Film Festival. Erm — in what context? How’s that related to me?” Her announcement seemed to imply that getting the invitations was a great victory.

“Erm – to you? For one thing, you’re a Brit,” she replied with a grin. “And then, well, socializing. Taking the evening off from your reporter agenda.”

“Okay,” I said without much enthusiasm. “But just for your info, I’m not actually British.”

She opened her eyes wide. “What?”

I nodded.

“But your English is perfect!”

“So is yours,” I countered, my turn to grin.

She rolled her eyes rejecting the compliment. She was never perfect enough, she seemed to say.

“What are you then?”

I had to laugh. What was I, indeed? The weird Peter Schild, the global whizz-kid.

“That depends. In this context, Brit being or not being?” I tried to sound smart. But something was wrong.

“I mean, to be or not to be a Brit,” I added a bit embarrassed. What an awkward mess, trying to be funny but then having to go back to correct yourself.

Mona smiled expectantly. Did she still want an answer?

“Okay, fine, I suppose I’m German.”

“You suppose so.”

“Considering I’ve been living my whole life in Britain, yes.”

“I see. Brit Sein oder Nichtsein, right?”

Oh, no. She knew German, too.

“Just background knowledge, don’t worry,” she added, as if reading my thoughts. “So: language interference. Does it happen often?”

Was she questioning me?  

Language interference heard itself – hörte sich an – sounded – like something serious. A syndrome. Something persistent. And I felt that the more we talked about it, the worse it was getting, which never ever really happened to me. Herrgott, I’m a well-known reporter at a major private TV network in Britain, doing this job for over 25 years!

“So that’s why your name. Schild. Does it mean anything in German?”

“Should it? Names don’t need to mean anything.”

“Sure, but they often do,” and she grinned again.

If it had to, here it went.

“Actually, yes, it does. It means sign, signpost. Also – shield.”

I hoped we could now move on. My name was not really my thing, my topic of vivid conversation.

“Oh, that’s fascinating! So Peter Schild is a sign standing for something else, shielding that secret behind, in the dark,” she said opening her palms in front of her eyes, as in mystery and magic.

She was just teasing. I got it. But I was the interviewer here. The reporter.

“So tell me – “ I started somewhat abruptly, but stopped short, at a loss for a question, and pretended to be studying the menu. It felt like tree bark and the writing seemed to have been chiselled in.  

“Anything!” Mona replied all too eager.

My coffee landed smoothly before me. It was black. The dark silhouette was already gone before I had the chance to say thank you. Mona kept gazing at me intently.

“When’s this friend of yours coming, did he tell you?”

A senior manager, post-’89 generation, she’d said. He was going to fill me in on the new middle class and corporate lifestyle in Romania.

“Must be here any minute now. But tell me, do you have family in Britain? Kids and all?”

“Yes, actually, loads of them,” I said with a brief laugh, “not just in Britain. I’ve got three in Britain, one with my second wife and two with my current one.” Was the current one still current? We’d been in touch with a divorce attorney and were looking at the options. “And then I’ve got one kid in South Africa, one in Indonesia, and one more, in Canada.”

There was no point counting the divorces. They might be self-evident for a careful listener, or just a sharp mind. Mona was both.

“Wow!” she exclaimed letting her jaw drop. “The wandering reporter and the globe-trotting Peter. Schild. Peter Schild.”

“Yeah, that’s my life. I’m very good at my job, you know? People know me in Britain, they recognize me out there pretty often.”

“I bet. You seem to be very direct, the no-nonsense kind of guy. Reporter, I mean. So your stories must be very good, I guess. Great impact and so on.”

I nodded. The coffee was good. Whether or not out of this world?

The furniture around was low and unassuming, a sort of minimalism possibly meant to give the tree and the ceiling maximum exposure. It all felt implausible, like a Photoshop picture, or a stage set. But it was doing something to you. Amid that sophisticated space, the tree, giving off a smell of earth and leaves and sap, had a somewhat hallucinating effect.

Or did they pour something in the coffee?

The tree smelled of real life, but the place was like a dream.

“I wonder why all furniture is so low and the walls so blank.”

“That’s because they project images around.”

“They do what?”

She put the menu away.

“They project images around, it’s almost like the holospace on Starship Enterprise. You’re sitting here having coffee and around you there’s life from a different time and place. They’ve got every decade since the nineteen-twenties, and cities, rural images, landscapes, you name it. All of them are true-to-life, the natural size, as if you were inside that world, that’s why the large wall surfaces.”

I was starting to get creeps down my spine.

“And I thought I knew Romania,” I said. “Well, knew it, but never really understood it. Just like this place. So odd.”

“How many times you’ve been here?”

I exhaled deep and shook my head, trying to count. “A dozen times, perhaps? I was here that December ’89.”

“What? Incredible! You don’t look that – experienced.”

I laughed. “I know. Everyone tells me that. I have a kid’s face, they say.”

Like Mona. Only she was really still a kid.

“But do tell me about Romania,” she asked, not realizing how funny it was that we’d switched roles.

“I owe my career breakthrough to Romania. Reporting live from the University Square that December. I had the same room in the Intercontinental as now. I’ve always booked it ever since, whenever I’m in Bucharest. From the balcony, perfect view of the riots. And the following year, I was here four or five times, again. I’ve seen and reported on everything. Ceausescu’s People’s House – where we were today, for Parliament. His big industrial plants. The orphanages – god it was all so desolating. I used to call Romania the country of ten thousand shades of grey. It’s changed a lot, though, it’s so vivid now — ”

“But were there people, real people in your stories, too?”

“Oh, yes. We had a young family, just twenty or so, who had a baby and their parents wouldn’t support them. So they both went to work each day in different shifts, but for half an hour the kid, barely one year old, would be alone in the flat. The guy took us home from his workplace, he opened the door, we had our cameras on, we go through a tight hall, into the living room, and there – a dwarf is sitting on his potty.”

“Wow!”

“Yes. Wow indeed. That got us such ratings!

“And then, we had a student like you, his father was a miner, and when the miners came to Bucharest to thrash off the student demos, he got beaten up by his dad’s mates. They even recognized him. He ended half dead in hospital. He left to Canada right after he recovered, and I think never got back.”

“God! Are there sunnier stories in your portfolio?”

“Well. I’ve been all around the world. Been-there-done-that kind of thing. Spent a night in jail in Iran, slept under the sky in Ethiopia, carried debris after the tsunami in Thailand. You think of it, I did it. News highlights don’t tend to be sunny, you know.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of it? I mean, don’t you get tired of showing and telling? Always reporting, never belonging?”

“I’m a story-teller.”

“Yes. Other people’s stories. I wonder what story you tell yourself, Peter. Schild. Peter Schild,” she teased.

The hydrangeas that I’d seen next to the house flashed through my mind, this time in full bloom, in the shade of the apple tree growing behind the neighbour’s fence. They took up the full bed, which was narrow and squeezed between the fence and the path. A tiny little garden that was, just a patch, overgrown with the two huge hydrangeas, both splashed with cyclamen blots the size of Tante Elsa’s palms held together. The din of the Berliner building sites was roaring away, though muffled by the apple tree and the shady garden bed that smelled of damp earth and Torf and whatever else Tante Elsa would prime her hydrangeas with.

“Thoughtful?” I heard Mona.

“Yes, a bit”, I gave to — ich gab zu — I admitted.

I must have been just two or three on that garden path watching Elsa hobbling along past her hydrangeas, because in ‘61 it was all over.

Was I recalling this, or was my mind simply rambling?

“We could ask them to project something,” Mona said. “Come on, let’s get some action here,” she added, springing to her feet and vanishing behind the set.

Then something crazy happened. The lights went dim and a glow was on the blank walls.

Mona? I called inwardly.

Und jetzt kommt’s – and now comes it – hell: and now it comes.

The walls coming alive as streets with building sites in the background and eine grüne Ecke ganz vorne in the foreground, where – hold on – those are bushes in blossom, cyclamen blossom, two of them, huddled together under an apple tree (or is it my tree here, bowing over my head, over this table?), and a garden path – and who should be trotting toward me, other than – Mona herself! Was noch soll da auf mich zukommen, Herr Gott nochmal!

I mean, what else might be coming, my goodness!

“There you are,” Mona let herself fall on the chair. “Thought you might like it – Berlin!”

Yes, Berlin it was. Just the day before she sprang from her window over the wall.

“Even if it’s before your time,” she added. “It’s when the wall was being erected, see there? That was ‘61 if I’m correct.”

“Genau — That’s right. I was four.”

“You lived that?” Mona opened her eyes wide.  

“I’ve seen all that. Ich war eigentlich da, I mean, I was actually there, I might even be in one of these damn pictures.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a Berliner!”

“I was damals a Berliner,” I stressed the past. “Yes. Soldiers trampling across our little garden. Building something for what I can remember.”

“Goodness,” Mona whispered. “So you’re saying that your parents’ house was standing directly on the border? Where the wall was built?”

“No, no, no, that wasn’t my parents’ house. Just where we were living. Me and — Elsa and Erika, Ersatz-mamas. Ganz lieb und harmlos.”

I was startled to hear my words, but Mona was listening voll dabei — quite full there with me. Hell, you know what I mean.

“I mean, aunts Elsa and Erika raised me. My parents were working abroad. But that’s an ancient story, let the past rest, we say in German.”

The word we startled me, but I didn’t care much. Als wäre es wichtig, wo ich herkomme — as would this matter, where I fromcome!

“Hi! I’m Andreas.”

A dark, intent gaze, right into my eyes, sucked me mercifully out of the whirl.

Was it the Romanian version: Andrei? Or the English: Andrew?

Andreas pulled a chair from another table and sat down with us.

Mona was chattering some introductions away, journalist, Schild, London, Berlin, TV.

“Andreas is the deputy general manager with Star Trek Romania.”

“Nice to meet you. Mona told me about your mission here these days.”

“My mission. Yeah. Give Romania to the West!”

“We would actually need Romania to be given back to Romanians, but I guess we still need to wait for that!” he replied in a low, soothing voice.

“Give Romania back to Romanians – great headline indeed!”

“But before Peter gives Romania either to the West or back to Romanians, we must first give him something, some stuff to chew,” Mona said.

“Yeah, that’s right. You’ve been giving me quite a lot actually,” I added trying hard to sound funny.

“What have you been giving Peter?” Andreas turned to Mona.

LSD, maybe?

“Well,” she drawled, “we almost got lost in the House of Parliament — ”

“ — where I was nearly killed by the gibberish of the Parliament debate — ”

“ — right, and now we’re sitting here gemütlich as they say in German under this tree, with these nostalgic Berlin images floating around, because he’s actually German, by the way — so we could almost claim we’re giving Germany back to Peter so he can give Romania back to us, ha ha!”

Andreas had worked for his corporation abroad, so I wasn’t sure he was the typical Romanian. Still. It felt good to be talking to someone less likely to take me on an adventure ride into the depth of the year ‘61.

The pictures on the walls had mercifully receded into blankness.

But a background weariness was creeping in.

Berlin, my lost citadel. Wenn die Soonne hinter den Dächern versinkt, bin ich mit meiner Sehnsucht allein.¹

Always these stories. What he says, what she explains, what they declare, how they respond. The buzz words, the buzz stories. The unusual, the unexpected, the foreignness, the a-ha, the aahh – achso, the wow, here’s one interview, there’s a footage, here’s the gist, here’s the worldbuilding, here’s the background, here the foreground, and over there the stage set.

The stories about.

But where are the trees? The flower beds. The wall. The fabric of the bigger story, in between the buzzes.

Mona knew all the highlights and all the gossip.

Where the Romanian president had got drunk the night before. How a senator’s brat had killed two people driving his Lamborghini and the victims’ families had been paid a few thousands of euros under the table. How thick files on tax evasion and EU funds embezzlement had mysteriously vanished from the Senior Prosecutor’s office, press spokespeople saying “we’re still searching”. Apparently they were checking the cellar now.

I needed fresh air.

I realised at the front door where I was going.

The hydrangeas.

Went down the steps and turned left. The sun had set.

Here they are. Blooming. In this December frost?

My coat is inside, and my spine’s freezing.

I walk past the hydrangeas, to the wall. Smells of the cellar whiffing up from the small window stuck half open. Somewhere there has to be the door through to the entrance hall with the letterboxes, and then out into the street. Bernauer Straße.

No door. Kann nicht sein. Can’t be. Did they brick it up this side, too?

I walk back to the hydrangeas. Ahead there’s the tunnel under the vaulted wisteria. I walk up to it, but stand still at the near end. If I go through, I’m back to the street where Mona and I came in from.

I turn around. What am I looking for?

I trot back across the patio, past the hydrangeas and I can make out something lying out there.

My spine’s frozen.

I know what it is.

Her head in a red puddle. Matsch. Sludge. Clots, red, whitish, jelly.

Was ist mit Tante Elsa passiert?

What happened to her.

What was that story.

“Peter! Peter, there you are. What’s wrong? You’re freezing here!”

Mona grabs my elbow. She hands out my coat and my bag.

“Come, they’re closing. We got carried away chattering.”

I put on the coat mindlessly. Grab the bag. I turn around and glance back one more time. There’s no cellar window. The wall is just a fence. Funny.

We go down the path, through the wisteria vaults, and find ourselves back in the street.

It’s dark. What time could it be?

“It’s almost midnight,” Mona says. She’s ordering a taxi.

“What?” That can’t be. We’d come here late morning, straight from that ghastly Parliament debate. “What about the British film festival?”

“The British film festival?”

Yes, the British film festival.

“But that was three weeks ago, Peter. It’s always in November.”

Read the final part here.

1. Listen to Ulrich Tukur singing Wenn die Sonne hinter den Dächern versinkt on Spotify here.