Stealing the Future by Max Hertzberg Read Free Book Online

your new friends, your new clothes, your new money. Your West student’s grant from the West government…” A pause, what I’ve just said sinking in. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. It came out wrong. Sorry. I meant, when are you coming home?”
    But that, too, was the wrong thing to say.
    “Papa, I’m just the other end of the city! You can come out here any time you want!” But, seeing my face, she stopped. It wasn’t about the physical distance. It was about the symbolism. The Wall is still there, no matter how many holes we’d punched in it. She was in the West, I was in the East. Same city, different countries.
    “Papa,” she said slowly, “maybe I should have come back that winter. Things were changing, but all I could think about was that the system was breaking you. I didn’t want to go the same way. I wanted to study, but they wouldn’t let me. You know all this.”
    Her face pointed at the table, but her eyes turned upwards, checking how I’d react. I think my face had gone hard, immobile—the calm look I’d been trying to keep up had definitely gone. Katrin was drawing circles with her fingertips on the dark wood, as if the Zen that had slipped off my face had landed on the table in front of us, a pool of viscosity that she could dab her fingers in. It was obvious to us both that we were each thinking of the day she left. The furtive goodbyes, nothing said aloud in case the Stasi were listening. The knowledge that once she crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, on the way to Hungary, and from there to the West, once that first frontier had been crossed there would be no return. We would probably never see each other again. I remembered the desperation, the claustrophobia that had driven her away. I remembered my feelings that day: crushed, hurt, betrayed. Don’t shed any tears for them they told us, ordered us, on the TV and radio. Don’t shed any tears for those who couldn’t stay in this stagnant land. But I still cry when I remember that awful day four years ago. And I know Katrin does, too.
    “Do we have to do this every time, Papa? We always do it.”
    I could hear the frustration, the pain, the anger in her words. And I could feel answering emotions rising up inside myself too. It was the state she was angry at, that old GDR, run by pensioners. Stalinists. But she was angry at me, too. The daughter of a known dissident had not been allowed to stay on at school after 16, not to do her exams at 18, nor go on to university. She’d never said it aloud, but that was my fault. It was my choice to do the things I’d done, and she had been made to pay for it.
    Were families always like this, rubbing each other up the wrong way, accusing each other without words, the past a ghost that is always present? Having the same arguments again and again, hurting each other in the same places time after time? We always said, and left unsaid, the same things. Katrin was the only family I had left, I didn’t want this.
    “It’s just, some of us are trying, Katrin. Some of us stayed ,” there was an emphasis on the word stayed, as if I had pushed my emotions into those letters before forcing them out of my mouth. “We pushed the Bonzen out, we kept the West out, and we’re making a real, independent, democratic state. Probably the first in the world! You know this! You know we need people. Young people. We need people like you, Katrin! You can study at the Humboldt University in the East. We lost tens of thousands of young people that autumn. You should have stayed. We need you.”
    I should have kept my mouth shut, I knew it as soon as I’d said the words, I knew it before I’d even said those words. At times like this, I feel like I’m my own angel, hovering overhead, watching, seeing everything, my own face, her face, hearing my own words. The angel could see how I took a bite out of my own daughter with each syllable. I see it, but I always seem powerless to stop the mess I’m