bank_holiday_03.txt

Someone in that brick building on the morning of the 4th December, 1989, held a protective hand over Oma by expediting her file to the incinerator before it could be secured by the clairvoyant citizens, that were rightly anticipating that the Ministry of State Security did not expect the Berlin Wall to be last institution to fall this year, either. The ministry had pursued its goal of omnipresence with increasing efforts and the assistance of more than 100,000 informal informants. Its body however, was constituted by files, and where there’s no body, there’s no crime. I stole this from the title of your only film that would enjoy an audience beyond the small circle of interested individuals that sparsely populated the venues of the less glamorous sections of the Berlin Film Festival. ”No Body, no Crime” screened as part of a state channel’s series of features commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, with an airtime that with a little bit of luck would yield a handful of normal viewers from the ten-o-clock news instead of the evening clerks and insomniacs that typically got to see the work of you and your peers on television. The documentary was also the only feature that I became part of, the first time I witnessed you as what you struggled to be, a filmmaker. 
Already in the old country you had picked up photography, prompted by a similar gift from Opa that I would later turn down so ignorantly. You on the other hand embraced it, and the historic conditions around the time of my conception called for a multitude of lenses, eyeing the country and its citizens in an uncanny continuity everytime and everywhere. This fact fostered your professionalism at a time when the paved and sealcoated career paths of your generation crumbled within a matter of weeks. Katrin brought you your first paid assignment from one of her frequent sorties to West Berlin that you envied her for, even though you knew she could only go because her parents were grappling with sorrows far more serious than the occasional unchaperoned day trip of their eldest. With Katrin as a go-between, you sold two photo series to a Hamburg newspaper for the ludicrous fee of 80 Mark West, which in the light of the rapid inflation of the Ostmark had turned into a great deal already two weeks later. The first of the series captured the teenage reality of the worker’s state leading up to the Fall and it led to the task of providing a second series that would bring you to the locus delicti whose corpus you would sleuth out in “No Body, no Crime”.
Rostock is still a town without much allure to the untrained eye, which at the time afforded a backdrop favored by foreign editors who were avid for footage highlighting the inexorable demise of the eastern economy. The city’s Stasi headquarters were the second largest among the ministry’s regional offices. With the largest port of the GDR a quarter-hour drive to the north, it required 3,700 official and 9,300 clandestine service workers to nourish the file-fed body. A quarter-hour-drive south lay the other hub of the state security’s covert activities, where, a few days before the shutdown of the local Stasi branch, you met a mixed group of citizens on a neighboring property. Your gregariousness had proved to be an advantage in your new profession as a photojournalist, and had quickly brought you to the various grassroots movements that were blooming that winter. The assembly that greeted you warmly that morning with christmas cookies a woman was passing out from a paper bag, belonged to one of the more established movements, the Rostock branch of the Neues Forum. At the time, the fear of persecution still loomed high among the activists, yet the number of people that had come that day suggested a confidence in the possibility of change unimaginable prior to the end of the Wall. Without any clear signal or leadership the crowd started to move along the jointed plain road. The shared feeling of righteousness presented only a small relief to the palpable tension accompanying the citizens as they walked up to the chain-linked gate. A bullet-shaped woman in fur unexpectedly took your hand in silence when you came to a hold by the fence. “IMES Import Export”, you read, and a sudden pang in your lower abdomen made your knees give way for an instant. Your fur-trimmed guardian rushed to support you but before she got to comfort you further, your attention was diverted to the opening gate of the premises. The propagating uncertainty among the political entities of the republic had deprived the young watch officers of the tenacity to refuse entrance to the crowd, who had come without an official appointment to visit the facility. Without the guards and the countless CCTV cameras, the compound most likely would have never become a subject of murmurs and suspicions, a depot made up of a few corrugated iron warehouses and containers, advantageously connected by road and by rail to the nearby harbor. The two boyish officers in fur caps looked on sternly and tired as the group advanced to the first and largest of the warehouses. You stepped into the store in clueless awe and walked along the columns of identically stacked euro-pallets loaded with olive-green fruit-crate-sized boxes marked with Xs and circles of white paint or tape like tic-tac-toe. Remembering your primary reason for being there you took to your camera to capture the walls of ceiling-high stacks dwarfing the dumbstruck citizens in front of them. A handsome man with a handlebar mustache was shaken by sobs as he had quickly grasped an actuality that slowly spread from the vanguard to the last stragglers of the group. You shot a picture of one of the green boxes that had just been opened, capturing the prosaic violence of unordered pistols and loose clips up to the brim. Initially, the graveness of the discovery escaped you. It was me that realized the evidence's gravity and so I pulled you down once again, with full force this time, without giving you the chance to rush out. As you vomited behind one of the endless rows of pallets, the lady in fur again came to your relief. I didn’t leave you until you had understood that the weapons stockpiled in various states of disassembly were the final testament to your country’s duplicity. “Child! You’re pregnant, you know that, right?” Dazed you looked up at the sorrowful face of the lady, puffy with the clash of the cold December air and adrenaline-fueled hypertension, moved rather by your wretchedness than the thought of her government’s arms trading so mercenary it would have sold hand grenades to coconut shy stalls as long as they paid hard forex for it. She proceeded to give you the rundown of pregnancy weeks one to twelve while you continued to stare at her blankly and Neues Forum members and warehouse officers bustled about sampling other crates and boxes, examining way bills and customs labels to plot trade routes and polity-spanning ties that the Vökerfreundschaft had failed at creating. Provided the woman in fur was right, fatherhood could doubtlessly be traced back to the man only hazily recalled as short and dark-haired under an orange light shining in from a streetlight onto the bed you had shared that morning. You put your hands on the layers of cotton and wool over your belly and I nodded inside.
 
Your idea of starting a film about our family’s involvement in the late state’s surveillance apparatus was to enter my room one day, shortly before my fifteenth birthday, without a word of explanation or warning, camera already running. To my surprise, my rather rudely delivered opposition was not the topic of discussion later at dinner, instead, you placed your Video8 camcorder alongside the bowl of pasta in front of me. You told me that to start shooting whatever and whenever I wanted, no exceptions, for the length of the weekend, and that you would keep me supplied with tapes in case I ran out. I’m sure that you had had your expectations going into the experiment, but you never disclosed them. Apparently you expected that I would become some kind of peeping Tom, since you started locking doors during this time, which was otherwise frowned upon around the apartment. No idea lay further, with my steady supply of nudie mags from Robert, who worked at a newsstand whose owner let him get away with filching porn or candy as long as he didn’t start complaining about his measly wage, I was beyond the need for awkward voyeurism. If I remember correctly, my only questions were whether I would get to keep the material I shot - you affirmed - and if I could have my own TV to watch it in my room - you denied, however you held out the prospect of reopening the discussion on viewing limitations. The camcorder was a precious instrument and although you owned further equipment you must have swallowed serious concerns in allowing me to take the camera out of the apartment, just for the sheer value of it, which amounted to more than our household’s monthly gross income, including the two presumably untaxed fifties the permed secretary handed me in a cold-smoked envelope at the end of the month for delivering admail.
Our neighborhood was working class but our streets were not nearly as tough as I made it sound to my bourgeois friends at college, who imagined me growing up on the sunflower block that had been torched by white supremacist neighbors when I was a baby, though I didn’t so much as catch a whiff of smoke as Lichtenhagen lay far across town. Robert waited by the elevator in mismatched double denim, sporting a jacket similar to the one I am wearing as I am writing this, the one I coveted in vain at the time because good luck asking you 200 euro for clothes. As the elevator door opened between us, he jumped past me to smack his beefy left across the story buttons, giggling with too much levity for our pubescent indifference. He ran to the milk glass doors to mockingly court me, but as he spotted the camera he had missed me holding up to then, he passed over the usual slamming of the door so I had to jump to dodge the heavy leaf and caught up with me, eyes wide with excitement. He knew exactly what to do with it, he told me while I was busy to keep his hands off the dull plastic, lifting the camera over my head so that stubby, brawny Robert kept skipping alongside me in trying to snatch it from my outstretched overgrown arms. As he intonated the Zoom song from a recent Mazda commercial, I was uncertain whether his chant should provide me a clue to what he had in mind, listening to Robert was like his continuous switching back and forth through the innumerable channels of his sat receiver. The sat receiver was another of my obsessions, my frequent boredom watching at Robert’s notwithstanding, but I suppose you have kept renouncing the luxury of two-hundred-plus rebranded outlooks on the world to this day, moreover a satellite dish would have compelled you to finally clean the balcony, though presumably that task would have fallen in my domain.
 
Dismissing any past development of the terrain, the newly drawn property borders had severed pieces of land all over the city. The rudiments still clung to the surface they had once belonged to, but a ruler-straight edge of weeds and improbable angles of parking space demarcation too jagged even for the improbably shaped east German cars to fit into, indicated where the planners had cut corners. Most of the rudiments were dead space, shedded cells of the municipality between the adjacent lots. However, some had encapsulated the artifacts of their heyday that had become irrelevant in a matter of weeks just as they had. The dead cell we were steering towards housed a black, spray-painted Trabant 600 universal that, to everyone’s surprise, continued to start and run as far as the limited expanse of the rudiment allowed for a joyride. The spot was deserted, which suited Robert’s plan of shooting in the hours before the foreign children returned from extensive Sunday family meals. By the time we had reached the rudiment, I had let him have the camera, relenting, but more so making clear that it would be me in front of the camera. Stubby, ugly Robert could be the balding, gold-rimmed director bossing everyone around with his barely-accepted, eye-roll-inducing authority. I’d be the star, and not to forget, executive producer for providing valuable equipment. “Break the camera and I’ll kill you!” is the first sentence you hear me saying on the roll and it sets the tone for ten minutes of material that, despite becoming increasingly forbearing with my younger self, is almost impossible to watch.
 
“Break the camera and I’ll kill you!” “Calm your tits! I got this.” “You ready?” Cut. Off screen a clattering engine revs and stalls, an A-pillar jumps on-screen, my cursing face following, eventually replaced by Robert’s reflection in the rear window, peeking over the camera placed on a makeshift shopping cart camera dolly, ranting. “Stop! Stop! You’re off screen, moron!” An unintelligible response, surely swearing, coming from the driver seat. Cut. A heave-ho groan of physical effort setting the eponymous 600 kilo in motion, slowly the open driver window comes into view, with me in its center, awkwardly staring into the camera, trademark-grim, not-to-fuck-with, waiting until the car comes to a halt. “I rap like a degenerate, unanimously scorned by janitors and senators, generously honor lesser enemies with tinnitus, batter your head in the crack of the door like Joe LaMotta.” Cut. A shot through the windshield sticky with pollen. I remember Robert lying on the roof of the car for his cadrage. He easily could have leaned over the hood, but insisted on proning on the plastic hardtop like a David Attenborough of the asphalt jungle. ”Do not cheap out on the gory details, i will e-trade your flea brain on ebay/Customers appreciate special deals same day delivery every weekday become a powerseller on your organs and entrails.“ The youth clubs were just about to catch on to the trend, venturous media education students that would have otherwise been broken immediately by our sneering disobedience got away with their embarrassing icebreakers thanks to their mobile recording equipment they had brought from their universities. With my love of words, I had felt closeted up to the moment when rap disjoined words from poem analyses, sonnets. Words weren’t anymore bound to be scribbled dyslexic on ruled paper but could be fired off like a handgun, hammering glottis, cutting incisors, mauling tongue, so much potential in the destructive force of them. Destroying was the point in all of it for me, I wanted to destroy the lanky undergrad behind the mixer console with his two symmetric moles like dials on his temples, as if he could be attuned to have him fit meekly into any environment. Mainly though, I wanted to destroy myself, take the scrappy construction, tackle every loose end, and tear it apart. I wanted to preempt every disparaging remark, retreat, but like a boxer only to come back aggressively, snapping and spitting that the plexiglass window of our plywood recording booth would fog up. Your working class romanticism, I ripped it up, there was nothing noble about being poor and you hadn’t chosen being so, either. One could be a penniless imbecile and a petty criminal but you would only have eyes for the thorny crown of martyrdom, so did my teachers, the in-tune undergrad, the school board. As a martyr, I never reaped anger but only disappointment, the most demeaning of responses, because it chains you in servitude, never active, doomed to comply. The ones who understood I was trash were usually of my own age, and they made sure that I would not miss that fact, either, when I crossed them in the clinical mall corridors, heavily accessorized teenagers in metallic pants, indifferently dragging their brand backpacks by a shoulder strap and a cloud of generously applied aftershave behind them. I wish I could feel more sorry about depicting you as an alcoholic, negligent mother, but the same way as you had your honorably impoverished persona to exploit, I fashioned my part from the dregs, cozily inhabiting the role of the lowest person imaginable, tainted to the roots, besmearing even rap’s holy image of the own mother. “That’s my mother in the trunk, screamin in morse code, she hoes around to gather (a)nother dollar for a bottle of vodka.” Cut. Robert must have been crouching in the footwell. A shot turnt out quite well, me looking ahead as if driving while delivering my rimes, from below, the unconscious female’s perspective from the back seat, I’m sure that or something along these lines had been the idea. MTV had etched its narrative blueprints into our screenplay. “Cut! Again!” “Just go, we’re still rolling.” Aside from all post-hoc embarrassment I do find the lingo we insisted on terribly endearing. “That’s my mother in the trunk,…” And so on.
Thinking back, I am realizing that you must have been excited for my contribution to “No Body, No Crime”, because I couldn’t even finish Rostock versus ManU, Champions League final, me on the right wing scoring two goals in the first half, before you burst into my room and yanked the unplugged controller from hands. I guess you had gone straight to your editing booth when you came home from Bogart’s, the dive where you worked the early afternoon rummy shift. The reliable alcoholics made you cheerful while early arriving students depressed you. I hadn’t been thinking of whatever the northern sun had burnt into celluloid that day in conjunction with you, but there you were, hissing at me to pack my dopp kit, then storming into my room, throwing a change of clothes into a tote with such anger that I heard the soft impact from the bathroom. You didn’t talk to me, however I understood from the brisk call you made that I would be staying with Lule, my temp dad as of 2003. The bus schedule let you know that the next service wouldn’t arrive before 19:32 with an apologizing bow of its post. The glass of the stop’s shelter was also broken, which was perhaps for the best, seeing that you only just escaped the apartment without breaking china. A party was collectively joining in a popular schlager somewhere in the adjoining block’s annex. The bus came and I took a seat in the shade of a returning beach tripper’s inflatable palm tree.
Lule’s sofa smelled of Egon, his goldendoodle, who was listening to his master noodling etudes on the viola da gamba. After finishing his practice, Lule was coming by the guest room and stood in the doorframe. “You know, she loves you very much,” but I pretended not to hear him through my earbuds because I had heard him saying it a million times.
...
“Impossible.” Oma was pushing herself up from the kitchen chair under the load of a ten hour workday of which no one knew whether it would be paid, like you had already had the lengthy discussion that should follow. She opened the wall cupboard holding mugs and glasses as if to pour herself a drink of a hard liquor they never kept in the house. Opening a door offers little as anger’s sparring partner. “Wanda! What are you? A complete mutt?” she bellowed into the cabinet, startling crystal and porcelain, “On some ongoing blackout like half the country?” Your mother had the curious idiosyncrasy of inverting the dramaturgy of a discussion, starting screaming, becoming more silent as the conversation dragged on. “You tell me, Mädchen.” There had been two options of tackling the conversation. Option number one, the desperate, rub soapy water in your eyes, ruffle your hair, and hope for forgiveness through pity. But already under normal conditions Oma was not particularly susceptible to this strategy and recently she had been all too busy herself keeping her eyes dry. “I have a hundred workers on strike and I’m lucky if I can find even two with the same ideas for the future. I’d like to go on strike myself but I can’t, because there is simply nobody that would answer to it. I spent half my day today trying to find a single party responsible that is not temporarily suspended or busy packing up things in Wandlitz. Who knows what’ll happen to me. They’d be stupid to sideline one of the few that is actually in the position to mediate but I’ve seen those faces. Some people are out for bedlam. I guess I have to ask you.” Option number two, the audacious, apply kohl, clench a candle stump under the table to compress all your eventual feelings into. “You’re under twelve weeks?” This was Opa, tranquil in tone, his calm was unpierceable, as were his rulings. “What are you suggesting?” “You know all too well what your father is suggesting. And if you had any brains left in you, you would have come up with that number well before us. This is the worst time for having a baby, not just because of your age, even though you keep demonstrating your immaturity.” “We’ll fix an appointment with Dr. Virchow.” “Who did it?” As she fixated you, trembling, head cocked like an attentive crow, you realized that despite the predictability of the question, you weren’t prepared for it. He had played such a minor role in this, a spark of ignition, nothing more, that you barely remembered his face. “I don’t know.” “What do you mean? This isn’t Christmas, you don’t just become pregnant on your own.” “I’m not sure who he was.” Incredulousness. “I didn’t even know you were sexually active.” She had arrived at room volume and suddenly, terrified, you realized that she wasn’t about to sneeze but that she was sobbing, crying for the first time that you witnessed it. The candle was turning soft and sticky in your fist.
I do not fully understand what it was that eroded the ties between you and your parents. Were you so revolted by Oma’s dismay at your estrangement? That she expected in all seriousness that you would confide in her, whose auditing inquiry about your sex education lessons in eighth grade had been the maximal intimacy she would allow on these topics? Was it your parents’ insistence on an abortion? I doubt it, since you never struck me as pro life, either. Help me, mom, I’m at a loss here, because while I did perceive the staleness of the two deadlocked characters, I won’t let you off believing that you did not feel their appreciation, their love in the sense of the German word Liebe, stirring subsurface, knottily adnate and scarcely glamorous.
The three of you made it through the night, and the next day, and the following night. You were about to leave for school when Oma called you back. She and Opa were seated oddly on one side of the square kitchen table like a squished delegation. The delegation announced that an appointment was scheduled for Thursday with Dr. Virchow and that he would perform the intervention with discretion and priority. They established further that your unwelcome pregnancy had been merely the most blatant of discords. “It is obvious that this house has been becoming too small for us. It’s like three sleepwalkers in a single bed,” and this was not supposed to be funny. Arrangements had been made, a one room apartment five minutes from your parents was at your disposal.
 
January was arriving with a key in its hand. Its second morning was foggy, and by the time Oma and Opa had left after bringing by the last load of furniture, the air was dense with moisture and the steeple marking your old neighborhood had disappeared in the haze. But perhaps you were looking in the wrong direction. You jumped onto the bare mattress still unfolding, cool and new. You rolled into a ball, trying to get your ear as close as possible to where you suspected my uterine abode, but only your empty stomach made itself noticeable. You prepared a less than delicious calf’s liver on the unfamiliar stove and relished every bite of it. You, singular, turning, fuck them, plural.
 
You picked the coldest day of the year to hitchhike to Suhl. A dissident small-time crook distantly related to Katrin sold B-stock mopeds off the books and motorized you could make it to Lübeck in two and a half hours and in another hour even to Hamburg. The Schwalbe was an adorable reject dipped in tropical anti-rust paint with a bumpy topcoat like the peel of an orange but it barely made 55. Traversing your country along its entire length would take you about ten hours, no rest, no gas, no repairs, and after an hour of curl-ruffling freedom winding along regional streets you started to do the math. Entering Weimar, the engine started to smoke so heavily that a passing couple at a street light snarled at you to get out of the historic city center. You ground the sunset motorbike until it surrendered on the northern outskirts of the city. The engine spit dark smoke and squirted oil and cooling fluid like sad table fireworks and while you were seeking a safe distance to the bike, braced unsteadily on its flimsy stand, people started to crowd around the hissing display. They came over from a lone five story housing block placed in the wasteland of the Thuringian granary, dull and shadeless as the city planners had imagined the homelands of the complex’s inhabitants. I don’t suppose you were not scared, even though the group of dark skinned men didn’t pay any attention to you. Another man arriving with a toolbox made you approach the loudly arguing bunch. Without preamble, a young bystander elegantly dressed in cheap polyester clothes told you that Moisés with the hands of a clocksmith was the wizard of agricultural engines, and that he would repair your Simson in no time. Indeed, the small, elderly man was deftly operating on the moped at remarkable speed, commenting on every layer of the engine’s insides he unveiled with expressive humming through his lips. You were not entirely sure whether your ride was being repaired or cannibalized, but after only a few minutes Moisés beckoned you over to the purring, reinvigorated engine. “Where are you going?” “I need to get to Rostock.” A woman at one of the stoves not much older than her clucked her tongue and Moisés broke into laughter. “Well even if you might survive that, your vehicle sure won’t. Come on, I’ll take you.” A woman caught your glance, blurting out to your embarrassment “Don’t be afraid of Moisés, he’s a good man.”  
Moisés’ Barkas was ramshackle but it made the lower speed limit for the Autobahn. A portable radio occupied a third of your legroom and blared Schlager music in the time between valleys to which Moisés sang along, sometimes following the lyrics, sometimes improvising in Makua and Portuguese. For the first three hours, you did not so much have a conversation as you were rather shooting odd questions and answers at each other. When he suddenly looked over at you intensely, the thought of rape assailed you, but Moisés merely went on to remark, “Should you be riding that motorcycle in your state?” You were candidly clueless, “What do you mean, my state?” He pointed to your belly, even flatter than two months ago under the three layers of protection against the winter airflows. “How do you know?” “The lord endowed me with more than one gift.” An inert insect splattered on the windshield like a paint bomb on the wall. Moisés ad libbed a Portuguese line to the resurfacing song on the radio before the static inundated the music once more. “This is not a time for bringing a child into the world.” Generously overhearing his statement, you studied the title of the West German magazine in the door pocket. The topless woman advertising a health related story was effortless pornography, convenient as the West. “There was a tree in my village, it yielded the reddest, most succulent pomegranates you could imagine.” I reckon you had not heard of such strange fruit in your whole life, let alone seen or tasted it. “Every year it unfailingly bore the fruit that made the village grow in size and strength. Until one day, RENAMO came to the village and killed every one of its inhabitants but for one to tell the story. And the one surviving sat under the Pomegranate tree and cried a whole winter long through early summer. And when he stopped and dried his eyes and looked up at the sky through the leaves of his shade, he realized that also the tree had been mourning with him, and not a single fruit was growing on its branches.” He continued to nod approving his own tale. “What a bunch of bullshit!” You were more surprised than Moisés by your impulsive answer. “I’m not a tree. I’m not a blossom. I am perfectly capable of raising a child. Let me tell you a story. There was a woman, and she became pregnant, and she was riding her motorcycle through the ruins of Berlin while bombs fell around her, and she awaited the end of the war in an orchard so full of apples that she bore a child with cheeks like a Red Delicious. And that woman was my grandmother.” Moisés was smiling at your truish story but didn’t respond. On the crest of the hill he resumed his intermittent song.
 
If you gave your Schwalbe a couple of hours to cool off, you could make it to a Western city and back in a day. By February, these trips had become more than an odd school day skipped, because you couldn’t take your civics teacher’s voice close to tears, who was tackling time and again the curricular social formation on base and superstructure, but always ended up lamenting the booming triumvirate Kohl-Genscher-Waigel that was “marauding through our lands buying souls for glass beads.” You stuck around until late Mondays through Wednesdays, since your school’s English teacher, finally on a tear, was offering afternoon crash courses in his long tsk-tsked language. English came in handy during your trips across the border. Your second hand press contact that had bought your first photo essays had referred you to a colleague stationed in Hamburg. 
Real coffee waited for you at the cafe close to the Spiegel tower. Women moving their shoulders like seesaws under silk blouses, their shoulder angels slumped into the lush pads of their jackets. Someone was making an ostentatious phone call from one of the corner booths and gave you a lewd wink as you passed him on your way to change your tampon after the ride. The low-cut beats from the hidden speakers in the bathroom made you more nervous than you already were. You had been over-punctual, but Paul had come even earlier to feel exceptional doing cocaine to the piercing 808-claps in the bathroom. “These pictures are stunningly raw. Eye-opening.” His face was an abundance of display goods. Behind lightly tinted glasses, his blue eyes were eerily awake, and his scruff had an edge as if someone had spray painted it with a stencil. Although he’d just cut it severely with his credit card in the bathroom, his attention was intimidatingly intense. “Okay.” His German was better than your English and he made a point ordering you a sandwich with ham and mayonnaise, gracefully crooned umlauts, and French loanwords. “Go check out how they prepare it, while I look through these.” Victuals without bellybuttons. Crustless bread was indeed a novelty to you, as were the matt bakelite molds compressing the dish like a car door. When the barkeeper walked past you with the sandwiches you followed her back to your table. “You should really come to New York. People would love your way of seeing things.” “You think so?” “Sure I do.” A drop of mayonnaise had made it onto his crotch and he proceeded to rub fiercely on the stain with his seltzer-dipped napkin. “The picture desk asked me to nudge you to capture the protests. So here I am nudging, although, to be honest, I feel like your independent work is much more valuable in conveying your way of life. I feel like your talent would be wasted if I’d put you on the next Monday demonstration. You understand. I do not think that you are not capable of capturing the protests. I don’t think that you cannot do that. If you get the chance, though, of threading the protests into one of your series, that’d be something that I’d love to see and would also make the picture desk very happy. I guess Leipzig is a little far but Berlin doesn’t take you too long, right? Otherwise there’ll be something in Rostock, too, I guess.” He kept rubbing while he continued his briefing until the napkin was reduced to shreds. “I can do that. Monday might be difficult because of school, but I could skip it once.” As soon as you had started talking, he had resumed his flirtatious, twitching gaze into the black depths of your pupils. When you signed the paperwork with his heavy rollerball bearing his name and position engraved, he suddenly put his hand on your arm. “Do me a favor and don’t sell yourself cheap, will you? You have a real gift there. A beautiful eye, beautiful.” His voice almost broke and I would say he held on to your wrist uncomfortably long, but you were too taken by his words pronounced in honest English from the heart, a place only a mother tongue can access. Parting, he gave you a kiss on the cheek and five Mark for a long distance call. All lines east were busy, so you toured a supermarket for a souvenir instead, buying cans of soft drinks that turned explosive and then stale on your ride home, but you wouldn’t even notice it. You were bubbling yourself, in love.
Like everything else, the language of your country faced the need to match the competition. Paul’s correspondent friends chained words you knew in familiar sequences. They rolled their Rs and hacked CHs into crude stops, but you had heard that on your Russian summer camp friends as well. In the fluctuating group of different nationals, though, your language changed on a subtler level. The more they were wrapping characters and topics the more your language became flexible. It lithely embraced the concept of freelance journalism as it was explained to you by an Italian news photographer. It coated the arguments for and against Namibian independence. The softening made it adaptive and customizable, but also slippery and less reliable. Kohl’s promise of individual happiness would draw imperceptibly over whatever the citizens of the Democratic Republic would call so. When you talked to your parents, which you did only once a week when you exchanged sullen coffee for your weekly alimony, the conversations died or spiraled into dispute for the lack of solid words to set the coffee service on. You were receiving many compliments in those days. You shouldn’t have taken them too seriously.
Lule was your usual type and had complimented the hell out of you, years later, when you met him at an opening while I spent the night at Robert’s. He turned out to become my favorite temp dad, in retrospect. Lule looked and smelt of hard labor, bodily drudgery in a beautiful way, like a last poetic image of a Lewis Hine portrait, bright eyes so bright only for the grime of work around it. He wore an impressive, though largely ungroomed full beard already before fashion proved him right, and like with many of his conspicuously masculine traits it developed rather incidentally than out of conviction of a certain role model. In case of the beard, Lule merely hid his ungainly receding chin. When I stayed over at his place for the first time, he set a bottle of beer and two glasses on the table between us, yet I am convinced that he did so not with the idea in mind of becoming the father figure that get the son the first taste of beer, fish blood, and bought pussy that I must be in need of so desperately, but plainly because that’s what he used to do after work, a glass for the guest owed to good manners. He wasn’t uncomfortable but didn’t have a clue of what to do with a boy just turnt teenager. He asked me about girls and came to his own answer immediately, realizing that if there was anything to tell I probably wouldn’t tell him, and that he wouldn’t have, either, would he have been my age. To answer his question belatedly, there was nothing worth telling, apart from weekly shifting crushes, that had haunted my pre-teens all the same, but now with the physical implications of whatever was supposed to evolve from an abstract crush taking shape, had exposed a previously unknown form of longing. You had never tried to hide sex from me, neither the concept of it, nor your own, acts included. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep and walked in on you and somebody in the midst of it, you calmed me and then continued with me falling asleep on the rocking surface. Some people find that sick, at least I impute it to them. I instinctively omitted these details from the horror stories of parents fucking I told at school.
I remember that on this first night alone at his place I watched Lule pour beer painstakingly slow by the light of a multiply overrun candle stub, how stunningly beautiful I found him then, and how I panicky imagined sex with him in order to be revolted by the imagination of it and prove the desired heterosexuality to myself. Although I had heard the rap about how he would understand and tolerate me disliking him and the role he was occupying in my life from other temp dads before, I didn’t take it as the ignorant proposal of a convenient nonaggression pact as I previously had, because I felt like he wanted to get to know me. Looking back I can barely pinpoint what exactly made me suppose that he wanted to, and ever since Sergej this has been driving me mad. Lule appeared like a macho with a manic depression but I fashioned him as my misunderstood father figure. With my mouth open, coated with the hoppy taste I wasn’t yet used to, I was staring at the sword and the flail that hung on the wall behind him and even in the semantic field of weapons and war I cherry-picked the associations that reinforced my image of him. Having read my gaze, he asked me if I wanted to hold them, which is nothing a serious father would do, but back then, the heavy head dangling merely made me wonder if anyone had ever used a weapon like this, or whether it was merely a symbolic tool, like a medieval pictogram for violence. 
As the first elections of the budding free democracy drew closer, you hardly made it to class at all anymore. Too numerous were the opportunities to catch yet another campaign rally of even the most obscure candidate, which put another blue one in our pocket and, at least of equal value, another opportunity to lean over a table of prints shoulder to shoulder with Paul. He was leading you on, giving you the eye on Monday only to stand you up on Saturday, but who am I to blame you for not noticing. You didn’t know what was yet to come. Still, I wonder why you chose to become so dependent on him, after all, you did socialize with other photographers after getting over the pushing and shoving in the presence of some jovial West-German party patron. One photographer taught you to wait until the hit-and-run colleagues supplying tabloids and dailies had cleared off while tending to the generous, tropically embellished buffets that were commonly provided and only sloppily guarded. She was on an assignment that caused you great envy, hired to follow the mischievous frontrunner of the East-German social democrats, an impostor, as it would soon turn out. She was paid to accompany her subject to Moscow, hotel and flight included, while Paul’s picture desk didn’t even offer chipping in for national train fares. Before catering emerged as an option, you had brought along brown bread in wax paper. The photographer passed over your snappish attitude as if she had no time to lose in handing on her experience to you, who didn’t ask for it, but seemed in need of counsel. Unwanted was also her advice of for god’s sake not running off to wherever as everybody was, because this country was as much in need of you as it presented a vast array of possibilities. Paul, in the meantime, had different ideas. The time he deigned to remain with you after business had been settled, he filled with monologous descriptions of the splendor of his home city, its vivid art and photography scene, and of the opportunities he sensed, that a young quasi-post-socialist like you would encounter there. There wasn’t so much as a competition between the two positions, at least in your mind, where you were already wandering along a constantly repeating strip of urban canyon you had seen in a picture. Already that single insight into North America seemed to contain more possibilities than your reality in its entirety at the time. The America in the picture was spelling out the opportunities for you on billboards and marquees while your world, on the other hand, was marked by prospects dissolving in the uncertainty of diplomas, institutions and currencies. Karin and most of your other friends had begun to annoy you as soon as you had broadened your perspective through the viewfinder, and Oma and Opa were necessary evils. You were easy to uproot and you didn’t care because your anchor point had shifted to more or less join your center of gravity. Slowly, you were turning more spherical every day, the perfect shape, and with me, your motor scooter and more money always at hand you were more mobile than you had ever dreamed of being.
The root of our family as I knew it was Adam, Airborne Adam. You had volunteered fragments of his story one time or two, an utter fascist until suddenly he was not, or at least he did well enough at convincing that he wasn’t and had never truly been one. His life’s course had been determined by two forces, the East German airline’s flight plan, and his estranged brother’s capitalist aura, that in turn imposed certain limitations on Adams scheduling with regards to the flight plan. All other aspects of his life developed, ensued, and disappeared from his cockpit-cabin existence like condensation trails. His long life he lived in passing, with himself as the only cynical spectator of his own boredom around the socialist exotic. Adam left the declining Republic even before you did, to reconcile with his brother, who had similarly lost interest in frothy fraternal competition, and who had likewise left one friend too many behind to consider rejecting the company of Adam. The fourteen months they had together in Munich and surroundings, green alps, blue lakes, sufficed to have Adam appointed as heir of the two-floor prime location apartment with a view of a park packed with painfully worriless ski-tanned Bavarians, that struck me as the strangest people I had ever laid eyes on when we came to visit. However, the term “coming to visit” suggests too much proactiveness on our part, in reality we rather heeded a final call that had reached us across a number of half-forgotten, almost-decommissioned channels. Despite Adam’s supposed wealth It hadn’t been the prospects of inheritance that had brought you to send your apologies to the organizers of the panel you were supposed to stir up with your marxist defiance that weekend. Late flattery wouldn’t have paid off anyway, as it turned out, since Adam had financed the final years of his life with the penthouse as a collateral. I understood that your readiness to depart for Munich on short notice stemmed from a sense of familial duty that even your latent filial crisis couldn’t shake. Your graveness on the train unnerved me, as did the syncopated german at our destination and the staircase with landings the size of our living room without even a stray pair of shoes to take up some of the ample, empty space. I didn’t want the journey to end because I was shy at the prospect of three strangers that I was expected to have a connection with and I suppose you were secretly thinking the same thing. Oma and Opa would be there, too. In the past, our shared time at the five to ten family reunions had been marked by me being claimed as compensation for the rejection you showed them. 
If my recollection wasn’t mistaken, the woman that opened the door when we rang did not match Oma neither in age nor appearance. She was thin, with high cheekbones and a loosening perm, and her eyes were reddened as if she had been recently crying, although we later found out that her red eyes, too, were permanent, whether through constant hidden renewal or some kind of medical condition. Her training demanded that she would usher us into the vestibule, her disdain that she’d command us to wait there, as it was absolutely vital to check Adam’s condition for another five minutes or ten before we could set properly beslippered foot into his apartment. We had arrived before Oma and Opa did, so that she had a monitoring eye for each of us as we leaned over the hospital bed from our assigned positions flanking the head end. She did not even fake busyness and I guess we were both relieved when the doorbell rang, even if it announced the arrival of your parents. 
Opa, you and Oma formed the triumvirate of silent, angry, strong. My grandparents hugged and kissed me, Oma boomed the usual platitudes about my increased height and Opa told me once more that GENEX joke before proceeding to study me with smiling eyes. You plunged in the knife, faking surprise about their visit that was obviously, maliciously phony because it had been them who had forwarded Adam’s letter to us. During previous encounters, your comment would have prompted Oma to confront you, rekindling your cultivated anger that in turn would incense your mother, which eventually would direct both of you at your reticent father, who, to everybody’s indignation, believed it best not to interfere in your discussions but for ejected snubs that cut the dispute always too early or too late. Already I saw Oma turn around to face you, however, she reconsidered and turned to step into the hall. “Mr [Nachname] would most certainly appreciate it, if you could leave your shoes in the vestibule. Please be so kind as to take a pair of the slippers.” For Oma, this incident sufficed for a weekend-long showdown between familial privilege and administrational power, fought out in quarrels over proper ventilation, with well-aimed nods to familial intimacies Adam had apparently trusted his housekeeper with. Most of all Oma and her were fighting over Adam himself, what he meant, how he felt, what he really needed. As we sat by his bed immediately after we had arrived, I got the idea that he was mute, but Adam did speak, and past matters could draw brief yet coherent accounts from him. He remembered me, too - in the mornings, while the many people increasingly gave him trouble as the day progressed - although he hadn’t seen me in the flesh before. However, he had a vivid memory of the last time he had met you, and my imprint must have already stood out from the open denim jacket you wore around the house to save on heating. His narrative was clear but non-conversational and equally worded like a recording the few times he told me over the course of the weekend. Contrary to the Opa’s camera, I cherished Adam’s repeated tale as a gift that, as much as it became stale, was well-meaning and all he could offer. As this, I kept it like a bird in a box, I never asked or told you about it, not that there was much to ask you about, so this is straight from the horse’s mouth.
It didn’t even take a month of freedom of travel for my great-grandfather Adam to leave, and who would be surprised at a retired pilot and his ex-stewardess wife being among the first to pack up the few things of the household whose value wasn’t plummeting to unknown lows. The winter cold invaded their trailer, but “having survived forty years of ZK”, the weather should not pose an obstacle to Adam and Terezia going West, or rather south. By New Year’s Eve, they had found a spot near Syracuse and by the end of January, Terezia had packed her bags again, alone this time, because the closeness of the trailer had turned out to be very different from that in an aircraft cabin. If it hadn’t been for the preponement of the Volkskammer elections, Adam probably would have stayed at Europe’s southern tip. He wasn’t one who ran after and he wasn’t one who apologized. But now, society held out a blank ballot and “having survived forty years of ZK” he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity of casting his first democratic vote, even though his correspondence with his long-estranged brother had already developed considerable intimacy by that time. Lingering under the subalpine high, he joined his brother to spend a week on the Amalfi coast hiking and eating at German-speaking restaurants, where his brother greeted waiters in Italian. His brother fell back into old patterns of ridiculing Adam’s country, only now, under the Capri Sun, it hardly even mattered anymore. “The ZK used to write the election results on Honecker’s bowling scorecards, now we write it on western money.” Still, the offer stood tall by the time Adam departed to reach Magdeburg in time to exercise his privileged civic duty: The northern wing of the Munich apartment was waiting for Adam to move in. 
The day before the election already felt like a holiday. As many people, you had prepared for political debates that would eventually never be fought, because, for a classless society, the contact points between voter groups turned out to be surprisingly few. The finger food chosen for making good projectiles was passed, not thrown, and instead of drowning each other out in a cluster, the voices soon joined once more in FDJ and labor movement songs, and sometimes the pan-German national anthem. You did not recognize him in linen pants, tanned, with his mafiosi wing tips and an imported drink in his hand, waiting in a folding chair in front of your house. Quaint people were roaming the country in those days. You had worked out a scale, ranging from romantic dutch writers out to capture elusive glimpses of a supposedly disappearing reality, to foreign property lawyers struggling over cobblestones with an eye stuck to the viewfinder of the camera they panned left and right across the real estate. It took Adam a second glance to recognize you, too. He searched for a rest for his drink and only found the pavement, then he heaved to his feet from the too-low chair and opened his arms. Concerning your conversation in detail, I’m at a loss, I guess he profited from being the first unbiased family member you got to talk to in a long time. You must have talked about the pregnancy, because every time he wanted to start over with his story, he waved me near and put his trembling hand on mine, tapping my wrist with his finger. “That’s how you knocked. From inside. The last time I saw you.” You must have talked about your work, because he urged me to ask you for a photo you’d taken of the two of you that day. A photo that had turnt out underexposed, so you had discarded it. You must have talked about moving, because that’s what he kept saying, that he had been the one who had told you to go see the world.
Not only you were drawn to the formerly blank spaces on your maps. Oma and Opa left for one of the soon-to-become notorious weekend trips to Paris. Dinner, breakfast, lunch, and slumber aboard with the ever-moving views of roadside spruce groves and, keep your tired eyes open, a mythical city in the headaching Saturday afternoon sun behind the window. The butter-sour smell, the ubiquitous crumbs and ham shreds, and few hours of sleep pervaded by constant engine noise all contributed to the disillusioning impression. Adventure with a stale taste, adding to the mouthfeel of forgotten toothbrushes. In contrast to your compatriots, you were traveling only on missions, and you showed little interest in mobility for mobility’s sake. Trips beyond the federal German western border were strictly refused by your scooter, and your enthusiasm for touristic day trips was limited already back then, anyway. During the final weeks of the electoral period, Paul placed you like a bounty hunter with various German and international papers and sent you off on hit-and-run sprees all over the country, sometimes covering three different rallyes a day. And although the lack of time with a subject at times compromised your artistic aspirations, you enjoyed the freedom and the individualism of the lone rider that rolls into a perturbed town, takes what she can get, and makes off with the reward. After the election had been won - because in a free market society, everyone was a winner - you resumed daily school attendance without much of a dent in your scholastic performance, since most of your teachers were more concerned with their own future than their pupils’. However, you kept your town-hopping schedule on weekends, turning your attention to another traveling figure roaming the East German slab roads: salespeople. 
The principle of reputation through association had translated well from party hierarchies to the free market economy. The fact that a good had passed through NATO-protected hands was enough to heed the call of the bullhorn sounding over from the back of the hastily packed trucks that traipsed around the untapped consumer communities. At the same time, however, many of the desired customers understood that mere availability does not make use value, and so the masses flocked to the double parked sales bay but few of them bought, leaving the involuntary actors of the truck’s overstaffed crew awkwardly fumbling for cigarettes and a lighter while they waited for their audience to make a move. The proto-post-materialists delighted in the colorful packaging and the foreperson’s increasingly desperate presentation of her merchandise, but they did not buy. Once you witnessed a truck bed crammed with badly preserved 8-Bit video game consoles. Already to an audience of western BTX-junkies it would have posed a challenge to evoke the joy the wooden boxes had to offer without electricity and moving images. Most likely, you were among the few that had so much as seen so-called teleplay first hand, flicking cents into the youth club’s Poly-Play. Great sales were to be expected only by those dealing groceries or other consumables, which nonetheless turned out to be no gold mine, either, because in order to compete with the heavily subsidized local products vendors had to skim profit margins to the bare minimum. All of this led to an ironic regression of the market back to repetitive assortments of the expectable, with the only difference being the endless variety of labels and color combinations. You watched the salespeople from afar, you aimed your lens through the windows of a Deutsche Bank prefab branch at unsuspecting clerks vulturing over their mouseprint-buffered contracts. Everything seems more menacing in your war-correspondent prints, smiles and handshakes more insidious than elsewhere. Presumably, most of the vendors were nothing but bored-out day laborers, but you succeeded in framing them as ruthless conquistadors in double denim. Not that this angle would surprise me. I remember how we stood at the cheese counter: Me - six, seven, loudly complaining about a lack of sugary fruit in our basket, since I had already given up on the possibility of actual sweets by that time - you, and the cheese clerk, who was positively your stereotype of an antagonist. He, too, did not seem averse to confrontation, as he challengingly examined your bristly haircut. His hairy hand, softly sculpted through the working of animal fats, handed me a rolled-up slice of boiled ham, that would make me grow up to become a real man, as he said. You reached over the counter, grabbed a handful of wieners from their sad pool, and tossed them against his tarpaulin apron. “Right, let’s make sure he becomes a dick like you.” With the exception of checkout clerks, who were honorable exploiteds, you mistrusted all sellers, vendors, clerks and consultants, and your advance suspicion spawned numerous confrontations that I wish I would have missed. However, it entailed a spending restraint that kept other, perhaps more traumatizing experiences from me. Winter clothing had to last as long as my limbs would not have outgrown it, but I never had to wear them inside because of unpaid gas bills. Once I joined a friend spontaneously for a supper that should never materialize, and only later I understood that our rumbling stomachs weren’t owed to forgetful parents but to plain lack of food, an existential problem that I only encountered later and in theory, in the books you bought me that told stories of child-rich families far worse off than our two-person-two-room household. You shrunk your expenses with puritan zeal to an absolute minimum, and with equal fervor you defied the importance of money by establishing a thriving market of barter transactions among friends and neighbors. Aline from one floor down traded her hairdressing - that gave birth to your two-year cornrows phase - first for a haircut of yours, which was too big a sacrifice to make, and then for the aforementioned books that I had read through, which in turn inspired her daughter’s career with the local social democrats. You brokered our first internet connection to all three inhabited of the adjacent apartments in exchange for a selection of olive oils from three sides of the mediterranean, at least until an inconsequential cease-and-desist-warning for illegal torrenting landed in your mailbox. Mutual accusations buried the communal participation in the global community. Incidentally, the subject of the letter, a Bosnian movie, had also been the winner of that year’s Golden Bear, so it might as well have been you. 
April 1st was another Sunday inevitably to be spent with your parents. Opa presented his consistently small repertoire of jokes in recognition of the date and then remained a silent steward to you and Oma for most of the afternoon. The lawn chairs and wax tablecloth marked the unusually warm spring, and the equally extraordinary meat platter cried fat and engulfed you in the smell of youth hostel breakfast rooms. Surely your parents were no gourmets, but I prefer to explain the coffee-ham-combination with parental care for a nutritious pregnancy diet. That said, you were no gourmet, either and didn’t flinch when a plate of warmed-up cream puffs joined the buffet of cuts. Oma displayed an interest in your weekend work that was unexpected and therefore made you vigilant. She in turn was wary of the much-debated monetary union and worried for her pension. At the union branch, a frustrated clerk in an office half empty, half stocked with filestacks of uncertain future, had advised her to use her remaining money to obtain a golden retriever, because blind benefits may be the only annuity she would have a chance of receiving. Still she seemed relaxed, she loved the sun, and the west wind had yet only blown the covers of the most prominent of GDR citizens. Her own Stasi collaboration was dirty laundry as forgotten as last years’ fashion once the trademarked western wear came over. 
That morning you had woken up with your belly button popped out. It might have been one of my frequent kicks that had propelled it outwards. You often lay awake early in those days, sometimes desperate for sleep, sometimes marveling at your body and mine. Your insomnia was a flammable kindling and when Oma determined, not asked or suggested, that with great foresight you had timed your pregnancy to end coinciding with your exam period, putting not only your reputation at risk, but also your education and professional future, your fury ignited instantly, and your disappointment that your parents evidently considered your photography mere child’s play made it explode. The cold cuts bent their edges towards the sun, the cream puffs had been finished. With great satisfaction you realized that you weren’t even depending on the coffee party’s countervalue anymore and you stormed out, although without being able to find a sufficiently poignant comeback, and perhaps you indeed did not consider the negative implications your pregnancy may have on your Abitur. Oma and Opa pushed themselves up from their chairs and found each other’s eyes. It was their misinterpretation of the other’s gaze that made them tacitly agree that it would be futile to run after their child, making your failed Sunday peace meal the last time you’d meet in a long time.
Our family’s history repeats itself, as it seems. Or maybe that is just the excuse that I am coming up with, that I use to legitimize my own estrangement. 
Your parents were both in their twenties in the late sixties and early seventies. People think of the student movement, of Biermann, or Prague when they imagine that time in the East. But they forget that the generation of your parents were also the first generation to carry forward the principles and ideals of the republic merely out of dogmatic inertia instead of a conviction born out of a reaction to the third reich. Your parents grew up in the petit bourgeoisie, they were not confronted with literature beyond the school syllabus, they didn’t as much know that something like samizdat existed. Ironically, at that exact time that those children from good homes began to rebel against suppression and elitism, social mobility was at its peak. Because the parents that had helped build the GDR, didn’t trust their own children to take over responsibility, they considered the ones that would usually go unnoticed. They imagined an idealized youth, a textbook youth, and they found it in the meek, the ones’ that weren’t infused with ideas beyond the canon. Young people like your parents, who, if they did have doubts about their country’s future, needed the reward for suppressing it too much to become disobedient. They chose structure and humble prosperity, and would not come to regret their choice in many years. It was obvious that they wouldn’t understand you when you chose precariousness and financial struggle in return for vague feelings of independence and righteousness. Falling out with them was easy, but also uncalled for, because your differences were so gapingly apparent that you could have conveniently retained your distanced relationship, that simply ignored all controversy for the sake of peaceful holiday meals, which would have prevented all that guilt and trauma that kept looming over your relationship throughout my childhood. When you broke with them, they barely had any control over you. Their endeavors to constrain you were like the final resolutions of a doomed government that keeps drafting bills and legislation until the blanks run out. Still you couldn’t let it go and you let your disagreements spiral out of control. Spiraling, making rounds and circles, one insult led to another, one stimulus set another loose, like in the court-sized domino setups Robert and I watched toppling on one of the many German TV shows dedicated to orchestrated destruction, only to conclude in a grand finale, the televised river dam blasting if you want, where you would assume the exact role that your parents had occupied a good two decades earlier, desperately clinging to your vaning authority over your child’s decisions. Unfortunately for me, although the positions were the same, the circumstances were very different when it came to assert my own independence. Not only were you and your parents sundered by an additional ten years of age difference, they had become archived as part of the body of a society that was only awaiting editing and proofreading to become another chapter in the history books of the new age you belonged to. What did I have, on the contrary, to set us apart? Nothing but a penis and consumer electronics. I needed to defend my place, my role as a second parent, when you started to contest it. I needed to sever ties vigorously and without looking back, because you didn’t content yourself with the occasional know-all comment but reduced me to a gendered scapegoat of the family, ridiculed even by his own son. Without having reiterated the dissociative act you had pompously performed yourself as a young adult coming of age, I wouldn’t have been able to rebuild the tainted relationship to Sergej, as much as I hate being associated with the role of the absent father. After all, I had learned that these kinds of severances aren’t forever.
Our cross-generational weekend at Adam’s was not the first time you met after 1990. You had been hurt and angry - and as were they, I might add, even though their chagrin had built up more slowly, gradually - but you could not find it in yourself to completely deprive them of me. The get-togethers that you graciously allowed for were preferably held in an environment that provided both entertaining distractions - which was also my primary function during these meetings - as well as the constraining instant of public embarrassment over loud arguments. In 1992, your parents invited us to Hamburg for Whit weekend. Hotels were generally outside of your price range, but your parents must have gotten a special deal and were generously offering to pay for a second room in the busy congress hotel. I recently watched a documentary about the Doha Agreement, and it made me remember our micro-holiday with your parents, the few first-hand recollections my young age allowed for, and the yellowed snapshots of you and I under the early summer’s heat. Watching the adversaries in the plushy lounge among potted palms, exchanging over scrambled eggs, I reckon it must have been like that between you and them. All inclusive catering and an elephant in the lobby. Forty-eight hours can be a long time, but I succeeded in keeping you busy. You may or may not have spiked my fruit mash with red bull. With a child, it’s easy to fill a day’s time just managing, employing a whole chain of responsibles, who merely have to cooperate rather than communicate. I guess that’s how they do it, too, the negotiators in peace talks: Give them small issues to deal with, to forget about why you came to resent each other in the first place. Look for a changing table, fight the angry swan that wants to poke your baby’s eye out. It didn’t resolve any conflicts for you but it established a sort of respectful truce.
If it didn’t achieve anything else, this truce did draw the battle lines on that Friday afternoon when we arrived at Adam’s place. It did forge an alliance stable enough to assemble us around Adam’s kitchen table when his housekeeper had withdrawn to her wing of the floor. This time, however, nothing was distracting from the fact that there was a fissured family in the room. The large box windows amplified your presence with your desaturated reflections in the glass. Your father was playing with the elaborate mechanism of a corkscrew when he began with a winding excuse, obvious and uncertain like the leaps of Adam’s geriatric cat. “Dad, if you think I’m gonna let you pass with that wiedergutmachung-shtick, you have another guess coming. As far as I’m concerned you both have forfeited any right to grandfatherly knee riding, because you,” never wanted Michael in the first place, you almost slipped, “never were only in the slightest way supportive.” “Not supportive?” Oma’s moist hands left foggy outlines on the vinyl table cover. “We gave you all you need to become independent.” Me being there between you, feeling adult-like, my fascination torn between the heated discussion and the corkscrew that I had taken over. Part bottle opener, part Rube Goldberg machine, hiding the simple twisting and pulling in a cylindrical blackbox with a ring around it, whose downward motion drove a multitude of cogs and gears and whatever went on inside it. If Opa had expected a brisk exchange of excuse and forgiveness, a wipe of the proverbial sponge cancelling debt, neglect or genocide, he was mistaken. In months and years to come they would have to look for signs of condonation until you, stirred and tipsy at my graduation, would rather accidentally confirm the absence of any hard feelings left. Ever unmentioned, they had forgiven you, too.
1990 was a great year to become independent, not only because of the global changes that plowed up the kolkhozes of eastern Europe but also because of the rich choice of decommissioned furniture dotting curbs on Mondays after weekend trips to West German furniture stores and on nights before bi-monthly bulk waste collection. You rarely needed to walk more than a couple of blocks to find a nightstand, a lamp, a dish rack, or a replacement for the chair that had broken under your increasing weight. Most importantly, you had completed the furnishing of your apartment in time before the four floors alone became a struggle. However, not only your homely decoration made the apartment your own, more than it had ever felt like. The husband that the one-bedroom had originally been allocated to, and on whose marital welfare your domestic happiness had depended as if it were a fluctuating stock, had left his family without so much as considering a return to his former dwelling. You had proceeded to pay him in western Mark, which came cheaper for you. 
I once found a picture by chance in an archive, one that you had taken and that I had never seen. The photograph showed two young professionals walking along a dug-up street in pouring rain, showily laughing about a joke that I immediately suspected to be utterly tasteless. They could allow themselves the laugh, because not only two but three umbrellas were held over their heads by the anonymous assistants that the two managed to blot out entirely with their large frames. The picture bears a striking resemblance to another two photographs that you took, presumably at the same location, with that torn-up concrete slab road like a sea of ice in the background. The one of the group of children in tracksuits, each holding at least one, some two cans of coke, arguably props, and that one you took at night, of the group of textbook skins arranged in a plane of vertical violence extruding vectors of baseball bats and pulled dog leashes. Back then, you found nothing in being a profiteer, and you gave your clients the stereotypes they would ask for. Until you became one yourself.
The letter remained unnoticed for days, and if it wouldn’t have been for the mailwoman, it would have gone unnoticed for much longer. A mailwoman, however, has an eye for mail, for the material qualities of the envelope and the emergence of glassine windows and four-color inkjet prints in the heading. Every day, as she stood in front of the wall mounted mailboxes, the crimson shield printed on the long delivered letter caught her eye, and because she was not only attentive but also conscientious, she knocked on the door that, judging by the nameplates, corresponded to the addressee. Fortunately, you were home at the time, and the lady made you aware of your mail, not without peering into the apartment and inquiring whether you were the tenant. You informed her that her voluntary sideline had ended on January 15th, and closed the door in her face.
The envelope was so lush it tore with the feeling of peeling sunburned skin. The letter it contained was sparse in explanations. With due and proper notice you were to leave the apartment that had been repossessed by its Prussian owners.
So soll es sein, so soll es sein, so wird es sein. The cafe by the side of the empty river whose bed lay bare and moist like a dirty beached north sea whale blasted Wolf Biermann half-ironically over the speakers hidden in the crawl space, while the omnipresent screens continued to play a silent Beastie Boys video that threw a haphazard compilation of twenty years of missed pop cultural references at you. You nipped at the cocktail - on the house because you looked like sorrow - and waited for Paul, who had promised to be here at two and now it was two twenty, already. He came at thirty-five, when you were already halfway through your second drink, apparently the barkeep preferred you drunk to sad and hadn’t heard of FASD. “Sorry! I’m sorry,” he blared across the room that didn’t give him particular attention because this was a place of blaring, flamboyant people, that didn’t mean their excuses. “This freelancer just wouldn’t let me leave.” The cocktails were mixed with egg-whites that slowed your face. “Desperate leeches.” Paul by contrast was too fast for his own good, presumably not naturally. “For the record: You’re not a freelancer, honey. You’re an artist.” Your smile was delayed but satisfied him. “Now. What do you have for me? What you got? What is happening?” You showed him a couple of prints showing roaming businessmen. “These guys are grody. I like it. Got any more?” You hadn’t, because, frankly, you just needed to talk to someone adult that would understand you. With little more than three weeks until you would need to vacate your apartment, even with your heady poise of independence you reckoned that a word of advice from a grownup would be in order, and Paul was a grownup, and you were under his spell. “Wow. Bummer.” I’m surprised that he was even able to follow your account. “So what are you gonna do?” The luck you had to meet him just the day that he was sober enough to look you in the eyes and hold your gaze, so that you believed him when he said: “You know what? You should come to New York.” He had even stopped ticker-tapping on the hilarious Io-Imparo-Italiano-napkins with his shades. “For real, I’d put you up in my pad, and you’re gonna take SoHo in a week. You have no idea.” His hand clasped your fingers in the cheesiest gesture of encouragement he could come up with, and you misunderstood it as you had misunderstood so many of his overstated expressions as signs of deep affection. “I can get you an advance that’ll pay for the flight alone. And once you’re there, it’s gonna be easy to set you up with another something. People will love you, I’m sure.” Egg white was accumulating in your belly. I sat there, alongside it. “You can fly with it. Not an issue at all.” He was exceptionally alert that he picked up your momentary glimpse down to where I was approximately located. The fact that you largely overruled your bodily signals of exertion and fatigue didn’t mean that you weren’t concerned for my wellbeing. Miscarriage hadn’t made the curriculum back then, therefore for you, pregnancy reliably and inevitably led to childbirth. And one drink can’t hurt. “Know what? I’m gonna take off the rest of the day and I’ll give you the rundown.” He waved to pay and the bartender took his money for your drinks. 
Raw was his favorite word. Raw was how he liked his cities, juicy, bloody, hard to digest. Anything more than a brief question and he would cut in with another hymn to his native city. In three valuable hours of his fiercely contested attention he managed to subtly maneuver around the specifics, and only when he had already kissed your cheek goodbye, hastily because he was pressed to seek his other dependents, you pressed him for a concrete plan. “Listen, I’ll see to it that I can take you along the next time I go. I’d be surprised if they wouldn’t go for some American-in-Paris-type gig for you, so your flight should be paid for. Hell, I can probably wrap it up tonight.” And then he was off and I hope that you did realize in the sudden silence that he hadn’t even asked you if you wanted to leave. Then again, what objections were there, if the flight was paid, if you could stay at his pad, seeing that you had enough funds to just hop on the next plane back to Europe if you didn’t like it, and that your biggest concern would be getting a passport within three weeks.
Paul did keep his word about getting you a transatlantic flight, although he hadn’t yet come up with a job for you. But when your flight was scheduled to depart, he did not show up at the airport. When you called his desk he excused himself and referred you to a friend in terminal A that would put a 15-minute back massage on his tab. He would take a flight the next day, he said, or as soon as he had finished some important business. On the plane, the empty seat was swiftly claimed by the senior on the aisle seat for his impressively coiffured poodle that spent the nine hours motionless like a ribboned sphinx in its portable cage, watching you pityingly as you wriggled about sleepless from tension and discomfort. Paul had assured you that he would arrange for you to be picked up from the airport and you tried to convince yourself of his dependability, but a gnawing premonition of deserted kiss-and-ride parking strips under a threatening night falling deprived you of a much needed nap. It was your first time up in the air, just as it would be for me twenty-eight years later on the same route, same red eyes, same nail biting, same fidgeting on stale-smelling seats. Their odor spelled separation to me, like that of bus seats warmed by the friction of rough cotton, that set the olfactory backdrop to the aimless bus rides I embarked on when there was nothing left to say at home. I wish I had had your plushy guardian next to me, not the mid-forties couple downing one doll-sized whiskey bottle after the other. I cried occasionally, but not because they laughed at my ghostly apparition by the window, head hidden under my summer jacket to block out looks and light. I cried for every mile and for every timezone that I was putting between me and Sergej: the ultimate disintegration of a young family.