The Museum of Broken Promises by Elizabeth Buchan

Author:Elizabeth Buchan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781786495297
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The late evening was murderously cold. He buried his gloved hands in his overcoat pockets and headed eastwards towards his hotel.

Always, he liked to walk. A city’s topography provided clues to its inner life but the first thing he had noticed about the former eastern sector was the sickening smell, a mix of Trabant fuel and the cheap brown coal, which the Ossis had to put up with. Compared to here, Prague was positively fragrant. Where his grandparents had lived near the Letná Plain, for instance, it was still possible to smell moist earth on the spring winds and to sniff the forsythias flowering on the Strahov. There were other things too which he loved: the noisy gulls on the Jirasek Bridge, the rush of water under the bridges…

He smiled at the thought of them.

North of him, in the distance, was the Tränenpalast, nicknamed the Hall of Tears, a checkpoint where Germans on the opposite side of the divide had been forced to say goodbye to each other.

Tears. Desperation. Recklessness. People in disguise, forged papers…

Perhaps Berlin would never eradicate the Wall from its consciousness? Perhaps it would always be dominated by the psychosis induced by the division? Interestingly, some of the buildings that he was walking past were pock-marked with bullet holes from the Second World War and the murk cloaked the bombsites still awaiting renovation. In his heightened emotional state, he imagined that they exuded a spectral legacy of persecution and warfare which offered an additional perspective. Berlin and its history were a lot older than the Wall.

He halted to take his bearings. West Berlin had lighting but, in the part of the eastern sector where he was now walking, public lighting was intermittent and he was not absolutely sure of his route.

Unwise as it was to be walking in the dark unaccompanied, he relished the freedom. Life without surveillance was a luxury. (Had he ever imagined that he would feel like that?) If the Germans and British were keeping an eye on him, it was more likely to be for business reasons, not political ones and hardly at this hour.

Three-quarters of the way down the Unter den Linden he walked into a cafe. It was warm and clean, with touches of chrome and a tiled bar and a pretty waitress. Installed at a window seat, he ordered coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich and helped himself to a newspaper from the rack.

In the bright, new shiny world his reading habits were no longer scrutinized, nor were his jokes or his choice of clothing for he had been under no illusion that, in the contradictory, tortured, absurd universe of the Czech Communist regime, even a Party man did not escape surveillance.

He ordered a second coffee and drank it, reflecting on the surprise that the evening had yielded and reprising what happened in the past.

Anyway, now he was calmer, he could assess himself better.

Outside, an elderly woman with bunioned feet and cracked leather shoes shuffled past. Ossi or Wessi? She looked old enough to have lived through not only the communist era but Hitler’s as well.

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