Stone Memorials

Stone Memorials
by Rachel Lamine

Christian’s eyes lingered on the line of bricks, rising like a half-healed scar from the pavement of the street. It was always a surprise, that thin, twisting line. I had stumbled across it once, walking from the S-Bahn at Potsdamerplatz to where the U-Bahn station dropped beneath the surface.

I had crossed over and not seen before, distracted by the red cranes that crisscrossed above my head in a canopy of steel. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had seen the footage, Potsdamerplatz a barren wasteland, so alien to the jungle of metal and lights that lived today.

I knew how he felt, the impact of the snake-like track on the mind, all that remained of the wall that once smothered half the city.

But that was Berlin.

“So,” he said finally, in a need to break the silence.

A car honked, and we both jerked. We skittered across the street, away from Pariserplatz like dry leaves in the wind, caught in the act of imagining. Neither of us spoke as we moved, the figure of the angel Goldelse watching from the top of her tower. We dodged a group of American tourists paying homage to the graven face of Reagan in the sidewalk, his command a thundering force rumbling across the years: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The echoes of hammers and raw humanity hung in the air.

We halted in front of the Soviet war memorial, the somber soldier lifting his head above the tanks, one arm pushed toward the ground where his comrades had slaughtered, raped, and died.

An image of my German grandmother flashed in my mind, sitting beside me on the couch, her hair impeccably curled as always, a pearl necklace smooth against the crags of her neck.

“Mom, tell Cassie about the war. She’ll find it interesting.” It was more of a command than a suggestion. I could see in her eyes her desire to be loved, to be noticed, and so she spoke in halting tones about how they had nothing, not even a real family. The bombs exploded in the depths of her eyes, an old, old horror clawing against her guarded words.

Her silhouette wavered in the light of the window, a single tear that only I cared to see sliding down her cheek.

“I’m cold,” Christian said.

“You want to get something to eat? I know a good place for döner kebabs on Wilhelmstrasse.”

He nodded, his hands in his pockets to ward off the chill.

The winter air wrapped around us, our boots heavy on the uneven cobblestone walk, as we tread back past Reagan and the reptilian bricks, back into the pulsing mass of tourists with their cameras and their silly pictures with Mario and Luigi and the German-American and German-Russian actor soldiers in front of the Brandenburger Tor. We didn’t turn to look at it, the majestic, symmetrical arch that reached for the limit of the world, bearing Nike and her four horses—victory in all her glory.

Wilhelmstrasse was empty after the energy that consumed Pariserplatz. A few Berlin Polizisten hunkered on the blocked off area of Wilhelmstrasse in front of the British embassy. I had seen many like them on May Day, hundreds of police fat with padding and shaped by shields, their heads sheathed in bulb-like helmets in case the party in Kreuzberg erupted in a surge of primal frenzy. Trash had littered the streets for days afterward, something so un-German I would have been ashamed if my mother had seen.

“One thing before we eat,” I said. We turned the corner, off Wilhelmstrasse, toward the place where the gray stones rose and fell.

“What’s this?” Christian said when he saw it, and I knew the gentle slope of the stones played tricks on the eye, a strange checkerboard of patterns carved out of the city.

“It’s the Jewish Holocaust Memorial.”

The stones grew with proximity, dark, rectangular wedges erupting from the square, waiting in seemingly uniform rows like a dappled specter. The first of the stones reached to my knee, and as we peered down the furrows I knew Christian could see the undulations of the paths as they slipped down, down, down toward the center—a chaos wrought of order.

We descended in slow, deliberate steps, the stones rising to my waist, my neck, and stretching up and up and up over my head.

The flat monoliths beat with a primal, annihilating terror.

A stray pulse of laughter echoed through the paths, ghost-like, distant. At the crossways, I caught the glimpse of a child in red—full, solid, alive—then gone, disappeared back into the bowels of the henge. We were hemmed in—trapped, bewildered, terrified—bowed under the disintegrating horror of what had come to pass.

We emerged from the other side gasping for breath.

 “How do you do it?” Christian rasped, his voice like stone.

A man in a fat winter jacket turned his camera toward himself and stuck out his tongue. The shutter snapped and the woman in white sneakers and sweat pants beside him said loudly: “I wish we’d stayed back at the hotel.” 

“Do what?” I asked.

“How do you live here and not go mad from the weight of it all?”

I looked at him then, his lips pressed together, his face a sickening shade of gray, like the soldier, like the uneven, nauseating stones of the memorial.

“Because I have to,” I said. “Because this is Berlin, but this is not Berlin at all.”

Later, on the S-Bahn, we sat on one of the green swathed benches of the car as we slid beneath the city streets. On the bustling platform of the Potsdamerplatz stop, I could almost see the ghostly smear of an East Berlin guard waiting in the dark, a prisoner of his own prison.

An old man and his grandson pushed on to the train at Anhalter Bahnhof. Christian and I stood to let them sit, and the old man gave us a tired smile as the tri-tone sounded to signal the closing doors. The little boy bounced in his seat, a yellow scarf wound around his mouth and nose. He climbed on his knees to look out the window, vibrating with wide-eyed energy.

“Opa, why can’t I see anything?” he asked, pressing his fingers against the gloom.

“Because we’re not out of the dark yet.” The old man folded his gloves over his cane, his milky eyes seeming to sing in the damp light of the car. “But we soon will be.”

Christian and I watched the little boy press his nose against the glass as the train rumbled and lurched, and then, roaring, shot out under the gently waking stars.