Stealing the Future by Max Hertzberg Read Free Book Online Page B

hesitated, a vague smile peering through her tears. She looked towards the bus stop, back at me. Maybe she did have a lecture to go to.
    “OK, do you want to go back in?”
    “No, it’s true what I just said, it’s confidential. I shouldn’t be telling you, so I definitely shouldn’t be talking about it in a café in the middle of Westberlin!”
    Katrin smiled. A grin that reminded me of her mother when we first met, before the care and the worry crept into our relationship.
    “Let’s walk a bit, here, this way. And you can tell me why you’re so cagey these days.”
    She took my arm, and steered me down a side street, as if I were an old man needing to be helped home after getting lost. It must have presented a strange sight: an attractive young woman, in trendy, Western clothes walking arm in arm with a bulky, grey headed man clad in cheap, nylon-mix clothing. But I guess everyone in Westberlin has relatives in the East, so maybe it was normal. From the side street we turned into another street. The tall buildings—delicate in yellows and creams, stucco patterns and reliefs gracing the façades—looked down on us.
    “I’m sorry about before. I shouldn’t have made fun about your coat—I mean, it’s not like you were the only one in a beige trenchcoat hanging around there.” A few more steps, another street corner, cross the road while I wonder where she saw another Ossi, then: “You know, I will come back. I am coming back.”
    I looked at her, waiting for her to continue, not wanting to break in on what I hoped she was going to tell me. She’d never before spoken to me about her plans for the future. Not since she’d left.
    “But I’m really enjoying being here, at the Freie Universität , being in West Berlin. It feels like, after all the years of, of…” she was struggling to find the words: “ suffocation , I can finally… unfold. I know that amazing things are happening, over there, back home,” again the vague eastwards gesture. “And I want to be part of that. I will be. But this is me -time. Does that make sense?”
    It made a lot of sense and I wondered, if I were younger, would I be doing what she was, or would I be in the midst of this new society we were building in the East? I was thinking of the endless meetings with the other residents in my tenement block. If I were in my twenties, would I want to sit there and plan everything from the communal kitchen garden to insulation measures? Maybe the answer was yes. There were some younger people in my block and while I could see that they sometimes switched off (usually when Frau Priepert from upstairs was talking about noise levels or cleaning rotas for the communal areas), they were actually really engaged. Without them we wouldn’t have the bike workshop in the cellar, without them we wouldn’t have links with the farm on the edge of the city—the farm that brought us food. Last week when I got home they were hanging off ropes, repairing the rendering on the side of the building—it looked dangerous, the work slapdash and piecemeal, but watching them I felt a sense of pride. And the building desperately needed this attention after years of neglect.
    While my mind was wandering, Katrin had continued talking. She was telling me about her course, the other students. I tried to keep up, but I had somehow become fixated on the bike workshop. I made a mental note to take my old bike there, and get it sorted out before the weather turned too cold.
    “But you shouldn’t think you can get away with it that easily,” grinned Katrin. “Tell me all your secrets!”
    I often had a strong feeling with people who knew me well, particularly ones who cared about me, that my face simply betrayed those thoughts I wasn’t even consciously thinking. Like now, I guess I had been hoping Katrin would be sidetracked by her stories of student life, and that I wouldn’t have to tell her about West Silesia and the dead politician. Had she read that on