CHECKPOINT CHARLIE

To Sofía and Jenny.

 

The jovial lady behind the counter at the Hamburg train station said that it would be not a problem at all to travel to West Berlin. “Yes, sir, everything will be just fine. All you need is a passport with your picture and, by the way; do not forget to exchange your dollars for marks.” Suddenly Batutín felt a shiver of distress; he became terrified to look up the vaulted ceiling of the station. It was extremely high like the Andean sky at night, but devoid of the myriads of stars. Determined not to show any sign of apprehension, he grabbed hastily his documents from the desk and headed for the train.

He sat down on a brown, leathery couch alone. He had the entire compartment just for himself. The last scene before he plunged into a deep sleep was the luminous evening on the platform where some uniformed men and carefree passengers strolled on the platform just outside his window.

Batutín dreamt about flying above an infinite landscape with a frightening speed, surrounded by shadows. Yet he was rudely awakened when the compartment doors were opened abruptly and a flood of blinding radiance assaulted the cabin. It was an unbelievably tall inspector wearing a Nazi-like uniform. He requested loudly that Batutín show him his documents. Terrorized –a flash of Anne Frank’s room in Amsterdam crossed his mind—he nervously picked up all documents and his wallet from the floor.

“You are going to be deported next town,” said the colossal German with a guttural accent.

Batutín argued that it was not his fault; the lady at the desk told him that it would be okay to go to West Berlin.

“Well, young fellow, you are right now in territory of East Berlin,” said the massive Teutonic, scrutinizing all the passenger’s papers. “And this is even worse: there is not a stamp in your passport.”

He turned around in a hurry and disappeared in the narrow passageway where the few, teeny bulbs faintly lit his departure. Will the dizzying sway of the caboose blow them all up? Batutín wondered, sitting there flat on his ass with his chin in his palms. Will I be arriving unexpectedly from East Germany straight to Peru with only one change of clothing in my backpack? Will I be leaving all my belongings in my room with Pithecanthropus Erectus, a hairy man from the caverns, my lovely roommate, in Buffalo? Batutín did not remember now how long he was there, fighting back his childish tears. The poor thing then did not know either, but what he in truth knew next was this: a Fairy Lady suddenly stood in the doorway with a golden wand in one hand and a gorgeous mulato kid in the other.

“You know,” she said, without any introduction,” that communist fellow is a crook like any Red asshole in East Berlin. He is not only overcharging you, I heard everything, believe me, and he wants to scare the hell out of you with the deportation scam so that he can steal all your money. Come with me, don’t be afraid. Let’s go after him. I know how to talk to these commies.”

Batutín walked behind her, putting his arms on both walls to keep his balance. The noisy clattering of the caboose was excruciating, nevertheless his strange savior kept talking about her life. She was from West Berlin, but worked in California, living there with an ex- Black Panther. Now, she was back to take care of her ill mother for a while. She said a bunch of other things that Batutín could not hear well. At the moment, he was more concerned about the length of the train. It was as if one would never arrive to any destination. Finally, they came to the end of the corridor lit by powerful illumination coming from an open compartment. There was the ticket controller talking loudly to the machinist leaning on a counter and guzzling a hot drink.

Instantly, his Fairy Lady began her vehement onslaught, almost yelling, as if she would have been the one aggravated. The harshness of the German language carried over the sharp clattering of the rails. At the end, the ticket controller was so embarrassed, so humiliated, that even Batutín felt sorry for him as he handed him over one by one his passport, his euro pass, his travelling checks, and his German currency. However, since he did not have enough of the latter, his Fairy Lady had to lend him the rest to pay the ticket controller. After that incident, the rest of the ride was a blur, and later for the office of exchange at once.

Another train station, and this time he did not feel dizzy; on the contrary, he was happily overwhelmed by the immense saloon from where he was able to glimpse the traffic on the street above his head. After reimbursing his Fairy Lady, he embraced her and expressed a grateful, moving goodbye.

Yet Batutín was still indecisive about climbing the stairs and facing his destination. He lingered around until a bizarre spectacle caught his attention: an attractive barefoot woman wearing a long black winter coat, a white scarf and red beret, was singing in the middle of a circle of beggars. At the end of the song, she released a loud fart and they all laughed grotesquely. Batutín, disenchanted, mounted the stairs.

Shortly after crossing a busy street, he found himself along a street populated by beggars, drunkards and women wearing provocative outfits. Feeling a great disillusionment (he would have a déjà vu of Berlin as a small version of Manhattan), he entered to the first bar he stumbled upon and nervously ordered a beer. The people around him did not even to bother to ask him where he was from unlike in Munich during that unforgettably sunny day. There, in the south, all Germans, without exceptions, gave him the fine impression of being of a happy, nice and friendly nature. Suddenly, a mature, blond woman approached him at the counter and she started talking to him in a hostile way and, even though, Batutín pulled back and shook his head negatively, he could still pick up a jumble of cheap perfume stench, of female sex, of the stink of alcohol and tobacco.

It was then, he decided to vanish, so he glugged down the rest of his beer. Just as he was getting his change from the bartender, a man arrived out of the blue, ordered a beer without more ado, and whispered to him in a British accent “Just across Checkpoint Charlie, a beer costs half of a dollar.”

Batutín then realized that in all of East Germany, West Berlin was virtually an oasis in a red desert.

At Checkpoint Charlie, a soldier wearing a light grey uniform, behind the solid glass window, ruthlessly revised and stamped his passport. Another, in the back of the compartment, kept an eye on several small screens repeating almost simultaneously what the former had barked. Two more others sitting in front of a counter promptly scribbled the words down in bulky notebooks. As if he had been whisked away on a magic carpet, Batutín landed on the endless sidewalk of a broad avenue flanked by an infinite succession of huge buildings with innumerable doors and windows sealed for centuries. There were no cars, no pedestrian. Once in a while, the quietness would be disturbed by remote sirens announcing imminent gunfire from the allies’ airplanes. Finally, fatigued by the never-ending building blocks as well as by his feverish imagination, Batutín stopped at a corner and sat down on the curb of the sidewalk. He looked to the rails on the narrow street that crossed the avenue. Suddenly, he perceived the sonorous tremor ringing through the pavement. When the tramway brought itself to a halt before him, he hesitated for a moment, but he decided to mount it. The few scattered passengers looked at him for a split second before they turned their gaze to their respective window. He sat behind an old lady who again and again whispered something in her native tongue, pointing to ruins of a burned church slashed in half by a brutal bombardment. It was standing there as horrendous monument, a colossal sculpture of the Second War vestiges. As if it were the tramway approached the carcass of the church, the old lady became more enraged in her ranting and raving mutter. However, she calmed as the tram passed through houses whose front walls still displayed the cracks and splits and fissures caused by the artillery’s conflagration where even child soldiers had battled heroically for the unflagging Berlin. Catching his breath, Batutín could almost see vividly in his mind the most horrifying scenes of the warfare that make him shed tears in the shadow of the movie theatre, when he recognized the corner where he jumped into the tramway.

Once again he was walking carrying his heavy backpack on one shoulder and his Pentax camera hanging on the other. The longest gloomy avenue of the planet was coming to an end, and if it was a mere hallucination, he would care less.

A paradisiacal and glowing scene came into sight, not far out of reach Batutín was still catching his breath on luminous building block, when he was approached by two young fellows who asked him, in English, if he would like to sell his old blue jeans. He gave no reply and the pair resumed their wandering among the crowd marching lethargically to what seemed a vast plaza with a towering building at the center. In front of it there was fountain with several high water valves. To his amazement, on the side opposite to the road materialized an immense recreational area with small elevations of grassland, where a young woman holding a camera was waving at him gracefully. With great joy, Batutín ran to meet her.

She signaled smilingly that she did not how to speak English, and taking a notebook from her light brown jacket, wrote that she only knew how to read and write the language. Then, she gestured eagerly that she would like Batutín to take her picture. Average height, slender, she crossed her feet, a tiny waist contrasting with voluptuous hips, and she swept her flowing golden locks from her forehead. Batutín shot the picture.

“Would you like to drink or eat something? There is a nice place, a Russian club, where we could also dance,” she wrote.

While they strod together, Batutín complimented the color combination of her outfit: yellow blouse, dark brown corduroy pant and beige leather jacket.

“Your American blue jeans and your jacket made of the same fabric are just fabulous.”

“Fabulous? Your English is exceptional.”

People passing by were astonished: they stopped for a moment at the sight of a Teutonic female and a brown Latin writing back and forth in a notebook.

Are they assuming perhaps that we were borne dumbfounded? mused Batutin.

However, upon reading their destination, the peculiar couple looked at each other with a sad expression of disappointment: the Russian club was full, and the hordes, at the entrance hall, struggling to cross the threshold, were being kicked out by the bouncer. The pair ended up in a two story building, with a band playing marches. In the center children were running around while the circle of people in the first floor and the balcony on the second floor gazed at them in tedious boredom. Jutta, for he now knew his companion’s name, appeared to be impatient and irritated; she murmured something in her language without bothering to write it down in her notebook.

They returned to the area around the fountain, and this time it was Jutta who was walking aggressively out in the front and Batutín was following sluggishly behind. For an instant, the idea of hiding flashed in Batutin’s mind. Right then, Jutta turned around and said something in German, and pointed a restaurant across the square.

Waiters dressed in black pants and white shirts brought to the table the mugs of beer along with a mini receipt. They started drinking at noon, and by twilight the strollers seemed to glitter. The only vivid scenes Batutín could recall perhaps for the rest of his life were Jutta writing profusely on the napkins. She wrote on that the waiter was overcharging several times.

“Here they always take advantage of the tourist who does not know the language.”

Also, when she wrote that she had an office job in town, while he pointed out in a postcard the fifth floor of a large building.

“Everyday I have to commute to a small town not far away from here.”

Finally the agonizing twilight, the crowd diminishing in number, their vague silhouettes seeming to drift in slow motion. The darkness settled down over the city, a sign that everything in life was coming to an end. The shining, sorrowful blue eyes of Jutta, almost in tears, told him that it was time for goodbye. Batutín could hardly stand and had to put his hands on the table to regain control of his body. How many hours of drinking mugs of East Berlin beer have been consumed?

He could never remember at which moment she signed, or gestured, or scribbled, to go with her to her small town where he would meet her family. It would not take to long too get there. Right around a corner they found the stairs for the subway. They were walking side by side to the platform when Batutín decided to kneel and put his Pentax camera inside his backpack, but Jutta kept walking to the train which was approaching at high-speed. Batutín ran as fast as he could, but the doors closed in his face. Somebody had to pull him back just as the train was about to depart. Jutta’s gorgeous face, stroked with horror, would emerge in his innumerable nightmares for the rest of his life, her tearful, melancholic blue eyes, and her panic-stricken scream that he could hear through the thick metal door.

After this painful incident, Batutín had nothing but gut feeling guiding him down the city toward Checkpoint Charlie despite the dim lighting of the avenue a little bit narrower than one he sow upon his arrival. Suddenly, he heard the noise of a bus stop next to him just as he was about to cross to the other corner. In good English, the conductor invited him to board the bus, since it was going to stop near to the place where Batutín was going.

“Exactly three blocks, my dear fellow. Watch your steps. You can fall very badly. At this time the city is very dark.”

Sitting at one side of the concerned driver, Batutín started to reminisce of the time that had just vanished with Jutta. Yes, there were moments when we together grasped hands very tenderly while consuming tons of East Berlin beer… as if the world would end tomorrow. Yes, maybe she was the woman I have been searching for in remote places of the planet. But Adieu! Most beautiful, most sweet… oh these foolish tears hurt my spirit. And, poor devil, --he reprimanded himself-- you should be ashamed of deceiving yourself with all these never-ending delusions. It is just another misfortune in your fucking life. That is all.

The bus came to halt and Batutín was expelled from the paradise of dreams and was back again tottering through the obscure sidewalk of his departure running parallel to the huge and grayish avenue of his arrival. It was less dark because not far away the powerful brightness of the line of controlling lanterns above the Berlin wall shone down. He could not longer hold his need to piss, so he rushed to a row of bushes, and when he was in half way through he was struck by lighting without thunder. Horrified, he realized that he was invading the front garden of a house. When he turned around a pair of Gestapo-like uniforms, holding a growling black Doberman emerged and bid him to keep walking, waving their lantern. He arrived to a large avenue and he proceeded to turn right with a patrol car at his back: they were monitoring him with the oscillating light on the top of the vehicle. Batutín overcame his fear and defiantly crossed the street toward a dancing club, where he stopped there to peek through the windows: a bunch of Latin and African males were dancing to tropical music of the seventies with blond women. Again the patrol car traversed the avenue and ordered him severely to keep walking. Batutín, yes, he was walking fast swearing loudly in Spanish, not out of fear of the Gestapo agents, but because right at moment he remembered that he had permission to stay only until 12. 00.

--Three more minutes, and you would have been deported –said Checkpoint Charlie’s soldier before stamping his passport.

Blas Puente Baldoceda