Flash Fiction (Berlin)

The Wall

Colored washes. Covered wounds. Locked, rusted gates. Cafes nearby and a circus across the road. The wall rises, marked by artists from near and far, lines the desolate highway. It is smaller than he expected, less magical. It is a wall and nothing more. He grew up hearing about the fall of the wall from his teachers and parents, saw the headlines on the papers over breakfast as his father read them. He heard the widely bandied stories, the histories of others, the generalized and accepted interpretations of what the wall represented and what it meant for it to fall. But as he looks at it now, all he sees are colors, concrete and nothing more.

He wonders what the the real stories were to the individuals divided from family, loved ones, their jobs. He thinks of the innumerable intricacies that must have been involved when people looked at the wall or merely thought about it. Like so many of the stories he was told as a child about the world, those fables of framed monologues that America and its education system loves to perform in relation to national and international new’s stories, this one too rang false. He couldn’t imagine Reagan and Gorbachev. Instead, he saw the faces of the women, thought of the children on their father’s or brother’s shoulders, tried to imagine the look of the elderly as they watched a section finally crumble. He wondered if people always thought of it or if it just became yet another one of those things people accept once it has been around for awhile. Like the lack of health care in his country, the subtle racism, the strategically segregated neighborhoods. He understood the symbolic meanings to an artifice’s destruction, thought of the twin towers and how many people were affected by that. How, too, that destruction was utilized for social and political purposes and how in the ashes of those towers, a new wall in America was revitalized and risen from the ashes. He began to think of the wall as physical which turns to mental and then just seems to become so normal that people forget about it.

He reaches out, trails his fingers along the bony spine of the concrete mammoth, tries to imagine the cries of joy in the reunification of lovers, mothers with their sons, fathers with their daughters and really begins to think of all the walls that still exist. He wonders why such importance has been placed upon this one when so many endure, when new walls are being erected every day between family members, within communities, across the nation and internationally.The misery of private property spreads so far, he thinks, marking us off from one another in continually creative ways.

This wall that once physically separated people has fallen. He thinks of all those yet to fall, looks up at the slowly passing orange and purple clouds above, turns and walks away.

Berlin Says Hallo

Red and white-checkered tablecloths, pelmini and kvass and two blocks away in the center of Berlin, we are suddenly in Russland. The communist bloc housing rises in the frigid afternoon air of Berlin, rain having just paused and the streets are empty. Cars line the streets, two old men speak Russian in the corner, their gray eyebrows swooping upwards, their mouths moving slowly, hands gesturing in arched movements downwards. The waiter comes, piercing blue eyes, sharp-edged chin, elongated face. Takes our order and disappears into the back of the restaurant. The wall remains not far from where we sit, the buildings remain scarred from the bullets of a world war not far past. Quiet. Cold. Rising buildings devoid of life and modern architecture rises in the midst of East Berlin aside years of centuries-old churches and theaters. The Spree river cuts through the separation, watchtowers still bear the metal gun stands, a circus now pitches its tents in the place of barracks and we sit not far from the Circus Hostel. Joviality meets doom, laughter meets sadness encased within the faces of older generations, within buildings now covered by the facades of particle boards painted in pristine scenery covering the scars of war. The clouds part and hit the Reichstag where the parliament now sits, grass rolling outwards from its rusty pillars, the grounds riddled with fallen leaves and spitting fountains. Deutsche Bahn not far, its trains sound the passings of thousands of people moving in and out of the city now struggling to renovate, cover-up, revitalize, renew. We finish eating and traverse the sidewalks of past gun fights, bombings, killings, taking pictures of stunning buildings, the art-covered wall as the polizei looks on from afar through lensed-occupations. We traverse the sordid histories of the past with cameras, steadfast gazes, and the creeping suspicion that we have not moved far from where we stood during those darkened years of war and terror.