So, again, I begin with the train. As we trundled along from Mannheim to Berlin, very frequently trains passed us going the other direction in a rush of color and noise. In the middle of the night, these trains became flashes of light you could almost see through and the noise they made was the noise of screaming. They woke me up from my dozing, terrified; they were the horrible banshee ghosts of trains.
So many ghosts. Like the shiver I felt when I idiotically hid my ticket from myself immediately before the conductor came by, that what if I don’t find it in time? All of the complaints we had – sore shoulders, sore feet, cramped quarters. In the luxury of complaining that safe people, that free people, enjoy, we find the real suffering of those we had come here to better understand. What we feel is an echo, a symbol, an allusion. Art is a ghost, hope is a ghost, prayer is a ghost – fragments of our best selves cast upward and outward. Hear me, change me, save me, save the ones I love. Here in Berlin, ghosts are speaking in the language of our hearts. At the Wannasee House, four cherubs overhear the euphemisms for extermination; two generations later, their empty ethereal eyes still fail to meet our gazes, staring instead toward the sailboats and the manicured gardens. Silhouettes in the concrete wall at the Grunewald Station shrink away from our yearning hearts into their own griefs and losses. Menashe Kadishman’s installation, Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves), clang beneath our feet like chains, like screaming, like dishes in the sink, like a train putting on its brakes. We are stepping on their faces, all of those faces, to make a desperate kind of music.
One of my ghosts comes to visit me here, the ghost of my father, a man who raised me on the catechism of the Cold War. Saturday mornings, he sat across from me as I slurped my cereal and he recited the names of the disappeared. Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, Romania, Poland, he would tell me, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Georgia, Uzbekistan. Furious and helpless in the face of so many oppressed peoples in the world, he told me, sometimes shouting, you can always have peace if you are willing put your head in the noose. He never imagined a world without the Soviet Union; he never imagined a world with a reunified Germany. Of all of the things that I mourn that he missed when he died in 1987 – children born, the family winery, my mother who he adored – I regret so much that he missed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Just one burden of so many that he might have been able to put down for a while and take a rest. Yesterday, I stood by that wall for him. It’s shorter, without all of the barbed wire. Like our stories that become myths over time, the wall looks thin, what little is left. I stood by the wall and thought of my father until he was almost standing beside me. It’s not quite enough – our memorials are never quite enough – but they are the best that we can in this life.