Built on Sand E-Book

Paul Scraton

• Herausgeber: Influx Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 306

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, you'll soon hit sand. The stories of Berlin are the stories Built on Sand. A wooden town, laid waste by the Thirty Years War that became the metropolis by the Spree that spread out and swallowed villages whole. The city of Rosa Luxemburg and Joseph Roth, of student movements and punks on both sides of the Wall. A place still bearing the scars of National Socialism and the divided city that emerged from the wreckage of war. Built on Sand. centres on the personal geographies of place, and how memory and history live on in the individual and collective imagination. Stories of landscapes and a city both real and imagined; stories of exile and trauma, mythology and folklore; of how the past shapes and distorts our understanding of the present in an age of individualism, gentrification and the rising threat of nativism and far-right populism. Together, these stories offer a portrait of a city three decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the legacy of that history in a city that was once divided but remains fractured and fragmented.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR BUILT ON SAND

“With a psychogeographer’s sensibility and a deep connection to history, Paul Scraton’s Built on Sand offers us a tender, fresh, and moving portrait of Berlin.”— Saskia Vogel, author of Permission

“Sublime. Cleverly shifts from personal odyssey to shared legacies. Scraton has taken the broken memories of a city, refashioning them into a novel that’s skewed and wondrous.”— Irenosen Okojie, author of Speak Gigantular

“Cities are made of stories, and Paul Scraton’s novel-in-stories is wonderfully made of the city of Berlin. Reading it felt like peeling back a layer of skin from Berlin’s concrete surface.”— Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse

“A story built from fragments, together forming a stereoscopic vision of Berlin and the lives lived in its sunken streets, masterful in its attention to topographic history.”— Jessica J. Lee, author of Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes

“A haunted and haunting novel about the way the past is sometimes more real than the present… Paul Scraton writes with an incredible sense of how place defines who we are.”— Owen Booth, author of What We’re Teaching Our Sons

“Paul Scraton will show you a version of Berlin you haven’t seen before… An intoxicating celebration of a place.”— Linda Mannheim, author of Above Sugar Hill

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM

PAUL SCRATON AND INFLUX PRESS

Ghosts on the Shore (2017)

BuiltonSand

Paul Scraton

Influx PressLondon

Published by Influx Press

49 Green Lanes, London, N16 9BU

www.influxpress.com / @InfluxPress

All rights reserved.

© Paul Scraton, 2019

Copyright of the text rests with the author.

The right of Paul Scraton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Influx Press.

First edition 2019.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-910312-33-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-910312-34-6

Editors: Dan Coxon and Gary Budden

Cover Art: Austin Burke

Design: Vince Haig

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

‘The Haunted Land’ first appeared in The Lonely Crowd #11

For Katrin and Lotte

I

The Mapmaker

The city was shifting. As Annika drew her maps, from the initial sketches to the moment she scanned her inked lines onto a computer, she could track the changes. And from the moment she was finished, she complained, they were already out of date. Something would have been added to the city, something taken away. A gap filled-in or a hole created. On her drawing table by the window she unrolled a work-in-progress, and stabbed her finger at the heavy paper in exasperation.

‘Here. Here. And here.’

She would ask whether she should change it, whether she should attempt to keep up with the developments as best she could, but the answer was always no. Yes, the city was shifting, as uneasy on its foundations as it had ever been; but on the map it would be solid, fixed in place. Her job was to capture a moment. If Annika would always be thwarted in her attempt to show the city as it was now, she would be able to hold in her hand the city as it had been.

To draw her maps, Annika would start by going for a walk. It was a key part of the process, along with trips to the library to source old maps and photographs, explorations of antiquarian bookstores and market stalls, as well as the hours spent navigating the virtual city through the glow of a backlit computer screen. Sometimes she would sketch out her walk in advance, when the theme for the map was fixed and the key locations already known to her. Other times she would simply set off and see what she could find. Her walks were slow, sometimes only a kilometre per hour, as she attempted to take in and document everything she saw along the way. For some maps, a single walk was enough. For others, she headed out two, three or more times, to different corners of the city. The most walks she took for a single map was thirty-two, passing through the very heart of Berlin before skirting its edges. A GPS system in her phone tracked her as she went, recording time and distance, creating a red line on a map to show her the route she had taken. After the walk came more trips to the library, to dig into the clues she had discovered along the way. All this came together, the photographs, the maps, the notes and the sketches, as she sat down at her drawing table, the blank sheet of paper rolled out in front of her, and she began to draw.

The maps were produced at a printworks in the north of the city, housed in a red-brick factory building between the prison and the airport. Annika visited once during the process, to check on the colours and the paper, before the machines began to roll and fold, the maps piled into boxes that were delivered to her apartment, to be stored with the rest on shelves in her bedroom. These were limited edition maps, fold-out pamphlets that she sold each weekend on a stall at the art and book market down by the river. Before she left Berlin the first time, the series ran to sixteen individual maps, each telling a particular story of the city. We had them all, lined up in a row on the bookshelf by the desk. One was framed, and hung on the wall above the sofa. One remained hidden away, kept by K. at the bottom of the drawer, in the cabinet that stood by her side of the bed.

Annika called the series A Way of Seeing, and along with the art and book market, she also supplied maps to a small number of bookstores and galleries, held exhibitions in Berlin and beyond the city, as well as launches of each edition that increasingly gained interest from the media. The maps made Annika very little money, certainly not enough to cover the rent of her small flat, which she paid for through work for others, creating logos, flyers, business cards and other graphics for various companies. That was only for the money. If people asked her what she did, she would show them, pulling out a proof copy of her very first map (A Way of Seeing 01: Joseph Roth) that she kept in her leather bag for that eventuality. There was no mention of graphic design work, of websites and business cards, nor the German lessons she gave to the international staff of multinational companies and start-ups. None of that was important. Just the maps.

For that first map, Annika had charted the Berlin locations linked to the writer Joseph Roth, who lived in the city in the early 1920s and who continued to return until 1933, when the Nazi ascent to power was completed and Roth went into exile. For Annika, nothing would ever be as exciting as that moment the first set of maps arrived from the printers, and she sat in her small flat to sign and number them, before loading a box onto her bicycle for the ride across town to Karl-Marx-Allee. The launch event was held in a small cafe on the ground floor of one of the huge socialist classicist housing blocks that framed each side of the boulevard. The blocks were designed by Hermann Henselmann, who would become one of the subjects of A Way of Seeing 11. There were a number of maps devoted to individuals, including Rosa Luxemburg and Käthe Kollwitz, David Bowie and Bertolt Brecht. Other maps focused on wider themes, from West Berlin punk to the literature of the GDR. On just a couple of occasions, she provided a guide to a specific locale. For A Way of Seeing 14, Annika roamed the Tiergarten, charting the hidden corners of the park where Jehovah’s Witnesses once met in secret under National Socialism, and she told the story of the East German stonemasons who were brought through the Wall to West Berlin to carry out essential repairs to the Soviet War Memorial. The map also remembered the Love Parade, and the time Christo wrapped the Reichstag. It reminded those who looked at it about the Nazi exhibition that told Berliners what it meant to be a German, and which took place in the palace that would later be home to the German president. All the layers of the Tiergarten’s history went into the map, all those stories, piled atop the soil of the old royal hunting grounds.

The maps were not useful navigation tools. Annika prescribed no route for the readers to follow and these were not walking tours. If the locations were spread out across the city, the map would take liberties with distance and the liberal use of empty white space to create a series of islands, a cultural archipelago where each destination was surrounded by just a handful of streets. In the white blank spaces, Annika encouraged readers to make their own additions and add their own details. Sometimes she included street names. Sometimes she left them off. And sometimes she used the old names, as they would have been when Joseph Roth or Rosa Luxemburg stalked the streets.

Although all her maps were contained within the city limits of Berlin, Annika’s longest walk took her on a train south to Dessau as she prepared for A Way of Seeing 09. She returned to the city on foot, attempting to follow the route taken by fourteen-year-old Moses Mendelssohn in 1743. When he made the walk, Berlin was much smaller and surrounded by a city wall. On arrival from the south, he was forced to skirt the city boundary until he reached the Rosenthal Gate, the only entrance to the city that Jews were permitted to use. It was also the only gate through which it was permitted to bring cattle into the city. Annika skirted the old city limits, following an imaginary wall before passing through an imaginary Rosenthal Gate. Once there, she was not far from her apartment and the cemetery where, forty-three years after he entered the city, the German-Jewish philosopher Mendelssohn was buried. It was there, next to Mendelssohn’s burial site, that the Gestapo would, much later, turn a home for the elderly and a Jewish boys’ school into a collection point and internment centre for the Jews of the neighbourhood. From there, they were transported to Grunewald station in the west of the city and loaded onto cattle trucks, deported to the extermination camps to the east. Having removed the living, the Gestapo attempted the same with the dead. They destroyed the cemetery and desecrated the graves. It would later become a mass burial site for the victims of bombing raids near the end of the war, as three thousand more bodies were added to the three thousand, including Mendelssohn, who had long been resting there.

When Annika moved into her apartment around the corner, the school had been reopened, the cemetery cleared once more and planted with a neat lawn. Outside the gate, a memorial to those taken to the camps was installed, while inside, a few symbolic headstones had been restored, including that of Moses Mendelssohn. Otherwise the grounds were empty, save the grass and the gravel pathways. It sent, Annika would say, a gently perfect message to those who walked by and looked through the iron fence to the grounds beyond. It was a reminder, she said, of what had been lost.

Annika loved that apartment, with its two rooms, tiny galley kitchen and bathroom that had somehow been squeezed into the hall, overlooking a churchyard on a street where Franz Biberkopf met a red-bearded Jew in the early pages of Berlin Alexanderplatz and where, each winter, we would meet beneath her living room window to have mulled wine during the Christmas Market. Over the years that she lived there, Annika noted the changes to her neighbourhood. She watched as, one by one, the squats established in the 1990s were shut down and the buildings tidied up. She noted the long absence of a homeless man, previously a fixture by the tram stop on the corner, until she learned from a neighbour that he had died during a particularly cold winter. Above his chair someone fixed a picture of him that survived as a memorial until the road was dug up to lay new water pipes, and when the construction site was removed, his empty chair and the photograph were gone. One evening, she realised that the prostitutes, who had arrived with the fall of the Berlin Wall to work the street just down from the synagogue, had at some point moved on. She had grown so used to their presence that she had stopped noticing them when they were there, and it was only their absence that brought them back to mind.

Despite these shifts, Annika clung to the fixtures of her neighbourhood, from the churchyard and the memorials to her regular dance lessons at the old ballroom down the street, where she moved beneath the glitter ball and the cartoons on the wall depicting the characters of a long-lost Berliner milljöh. On her way home from the dances, feeling the cold Berlin air meeting the heat of her sweat-drenched body, she whistled an old music hall tune.

So schwindest Du hin, Du mein altes Berlin…

The song was from deep in the memory of the city, the lyrics mourning the changing nature of an older version of Berlin. It was always the same story.

As she continued to work on the series, the maps began to consume Annika’s time in a way that the earlier works had not. A Way of Seeing 15 took over her life for more than a year, as she moved from one library or archive building to the next, in an attempt to trace the history of witchcraft and the witch trials held in the area of present-day Berlin. The main period covered by the map was the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and the towns and villages that once surrounded Berlin, later swallowed and reimagined as new city districts and neighbourhoods. The last ever witch trial, documented on the map, took place in what would become the district of Wedding, not far from where K. and I lived in a nineteenth-century tenement block, built to house the factory workers that transformed an old village surrounded by marshes, forests and lakes into the industrial powerhouse of Berlin. As always, Annika walked the neighbourhood, and although there was nothing to be seen of the old village, she lingered on street corners, locating the likely site of the witch trial where she waited to get a sense of the place, a feeling, that she could include on her map.

For the same map she travelled through the old villages of the north and the south, to Malchow and Falkenberg, Marienfelde and Lichtenrade, seeking out medieval churches and early modern farmhouses that had not been bulldozed by the expanding city. She followed the old ways that had once linked them, searching out the places where memorials had been erected and records kept. She uncovered traditions still maintained, including Walpurgisnacht celebrations to greet the witches as they passed by on their way to dance on the slopes of the Brocken mountain, and she immersed herself in the stories of the Thirty Years War and the tales of marauding armies, plague and famine. Devil-worship was a logical response to such times, Annika thought, as was a rising belief in ghosts, phantoms and spectres. The fault for misfortune was laid at the doors of black magicians, and there was plenty of misfortune about. Most of all, it was laid at the door of women, who would be tried and executed in their tens of thousands.

‘Imagine that number of people killed for their religion or race…’ Annika said to us, as the map neared completion. And she wrote those words down, and left them hanging, along the bottom of the map. It was the map that offered the least to see on street level, but it was Annika’s most beautiful creation, filled as it was with her illustrations based on woodcuts, sketches and etchings she had found during her research. She presented images of the women accused of witchcraft, because she believed it told us something important, and not just about how things were then.

She gathered together so much material that it threatened to swallow her apartment whole. When the map was finished, her boyfriend Adam encouraged her to throw most of it away. She needed, he said, to get her living space back. There’s a good chance that he also meant her life. But Annika simply found some order to her collection, gradually formalising the sketches, maps, illustrations and extracts from dusty, long-forgotten library books into an exhibition of sorts. She invited people to view it via a handwritten note taped beside the doorbells and a poster on the wall. Annika loved to hear the bell ring, to invite the strangers up into her apartment and show them the result of her work.

One day the bell rang; it was her landlord. He took his time to look through Annika’s DIY museum, accepting the invitation of a cup of tea. He agreed with her that this was an important part of Berlin’s history, and one that had long been neglected. But the neighbours had complained about the number of visitors on the stairs, so he would have to ask her to stop.

It was around that time that Annika’s boyfriend, Adam, decided to leave the city. He had found a house overlooking the drained polders of the Oder River and the Polish countryside beyond. It was a chance to escape, he said, as he persuaded Annika to go with him, to give up the flat that faced the churchyard, and move to the house on the very edge of the country. She did not require much persuading, as she often expressed a desire to leave Berlin behind her. She told us the news as we sat on our balcony on the top floor of our old tenement block. From there we could look north above the rooftops of the city, to the gentle rise of an old rubbish dump transformed into parkland and the wind farms turning above the horizon. They represented the world beyond the city limits, which was why Annika liked to sit up there. Living in the city, she would say, sitting on our balcony, it was important to be able to see your way out. When she lived in Berlin she came by once a week, to sit with K., drink and smoke, and imagine the world beyond the rubbish tip.

Before they left Berlin, we went with her in our Skoda, driving east to take a look at the house Adam and Annika had bought with money they had somehow scraped together. On the way we stopped above the marshland that stretched out from the Seelow Heights towards the border, parking beneath a Soviet War Memorial that looked down on a landscape which had cost the lives of so many in the final weeks of the war. From this drained land there had long been stories of soldiers’ bodies pulled from the peaty soil, preserved over the centuries from when they fell during the Thirty Years War. Bodies continued to be found, turned over by the farmer’s plough, but now they were as likely to be fallen Wehrmacht or Red Army soldiers as they were fighters from an earlier conflict. Layers of trauma, Annika said, piled on the land. As we walked back to the car, she told us she was sure the people there still believed in ghosts.

There was one map – A Way of Seeing 13 – that Annika never sold. It was never to be found in the neat piles at the market stall by the river, or on the shelves of the bookstores and galleries that stocked her work. On her website it was marked as AUSVERKAUFT, but in truth it had never been for sale. Only two copies of the map had ever been produced. One for Annika, and one for K.

The map was subtitled Where We Came From, and it was another of Annika’s islands, consisting of a grid of streets about six blocks across and four deep, a patch of forest with a small lake on one side and an S-Bahn station with lines leading out from it on the other. This was the only map for which Annika did not take a walk; the only map that required no visits to the library or virtual explorations online. It was created out of her head, out of her memory. She knew every square metre of this island, and she could return to it whenever she chose.

She did not need to walk the island because it was a map of the small collection of streets where she and K. had grown up, a few doors down from each other on the edge of the forest. It was here, in West Berlin, that they had met at primary school and then, in what was by now a reunified city, attended the same high school. It was here that they climbed the oak trees K.’s father told them were hundreds of years old, and explored the sand dunes created by the mass excavation of earth needed to help build the city. It was here that they swam in the lake, stripped down to their naked bodies when there was no one else around. And it was here that they ducked under fences onto railway sidings for first cigarettes and bottles of beer, climbed the walls of the empty football stadium to sit on the terraces with an inexpertly rolled joint, and disappeared into the woods for early sexual encounters. All were faithfully recorded on the map, in a code Annika knew K. would understand.

STEFAN (A). F/B. ALMOST.

Stefan made an appearance again, elsewhere on the map. A different moment and a different entry. This time marked (K). This time there was no more almost.

It was the map of a place and of a specific period in their lives, but what it did not show were the forces that were beginning to pull the two friends apart. Or perhaps it did. K. would say that A Way of Seeing 13 told you all you needed to know about how Annika saw the world. Annika was happy on those ten streets and with that patch of forest. Annika wished she had never had to leave.

‘If I had drawn the map,’ K. said, finger pressed down on the railway line leading off the side of the illustration, ‘it would have started, not finished, here.’

Their neighbourhood was part of Berlin, but as kids it might as well have been a village in the countryside. And while Annika was content in her village, on her island, K. could see the possibilities of the city that lay elsewhere, further along that S-Bahn line. She understood that there was something more out there, something other than the tennis club and the lake, and the fumbling fingers and dry tongues of her classmates in the suburban edgelands. That was the moment they began to drift apart. It was only later, after Annika had followed her to the city, that they resurrected their friendship in new surroundings.

Before she followed Adam to the house that looked out across the border, Annika completed her sixteenth map. It involved walking the entire 160-kilometre route of the Berlin Wall, which she did in thirty-two painstakingly slow stages. Her problem, she said, was that unlike her other maps, where there was often nothing to see and no traces to be found, here there were simply too many reminders of history to include them all. The line of cobblestones through the city centre; the memorials to those who had died; the surviving stretches of the border fortifications, the watchtowers and repurposed border guard barracks; the straight line of young trees, planted to fill the gap that had been cut in an otherwise ancient forest. A Way of Seeing 16 turned out to be not one map, but a bundle. Six in total, tied together with a piece of string. As the time to leave Berlin grew near, there was an urgency in Annika’s work. This was the biggest of all her projects and although she could have taken it with her, we sensed her need to complete it before they loaded up the van and drove east. All in all it took fifteen months, from the first walk between the Brandenburg Gate and Ostbahnhof train station, to the evening she called K. to tell her that the last of the maps was done. Adam had already left, as the final map made its short journey from the printworks to Annika’s already empty apartment. Three days later, Annika followed him.

Sixteen maps. From Joseph Roth to the Berlin Wall. From punks to witches. The maps were all different, and yet they were all linked.

‘This is a city of bad news,’ Annika once said, and although all cities were, in their own way, for Annika it was true of Berlin more than any other. She would deliver a list, counting them off on her fingers.

War. Division. Plague. Rape. Murder of women. Disease. Murder of Jews. Bombs. Murder of gays and of gypsies and asylum seekers. Ruins. Failed revolution. Successful revolution.

Bad news. Her maps, as a whole, told the story of the city, from its medieval origins on a malarial swamp to fifteenth-century riots, reformation and industrialisation, militarism and nationalism, National Socialism and communism, the Marshall Plan and the European Union. Later, after she returned to the city, she lived close to a patch of wasteland that had been filled with what were known as ‘Tempohomes’ – whitewashed shipping containers transformed into a refugee camp, subdivided into small apartments for families and individuals, television rooms and gyms, places to do the laundry or for children to play.

‘Berlin is the city where theories are tested,’ she said.

The outlier in the sixteen maps might have been the one of her childhood and adolescence, with its intensely personal subject matter, but it contained within it a clue as to what was going on throughout them all. Taken as a whole, Annika’s maps were her attempt to make sense of a place she had never felt comfortable in, an attempt to know and control a city whose ghosts made her nervous. So she read, she walked and she drew, forcing herself to know and understand Berlin in its intimate detail, getting to know it better than those who loved it, from the street corner and the park bench to the tram stop, the graveyard and the smoky corner pub. She connected all the islands and filled in all the white blank space. The unfamiliar became familiar, part of the known world. There was, she seemed to believe by the end, nothing to be scared of in this city of bad news.

And yet, when Adam beckoned her to the wooden house on the ridge, above the dark forest and the flood polders stretching out to the river and the border with another country, she was only too happy to hear the siren call. When she handed in the keys to the apartment overlooking the churchyard, packing up her maps and her drawing table, her box files full of the city she was leaving behind, she was sure she was leaving for the final time. It had been enough. In sixteen maps over ten years, she had conquered the place that for so long had intimidated her at the other end of the S-Bahn line. It was because of her maps that she had not been defeated. It was because of her maps that she was able to hear the siren call at all.

II

An Empty Stool

The night before Otto died, Markus had been at the hospice with Konrad, the three childhood friends together again for the final time. Although Otto could no longer drink and was drifting in and out of consciousness, Markus and Konrad shared a small bottle of whisky before they said their goodbyes. Otto slipped away during the night, as Markus was sitting, still awake, on the balcony of his apartment, looking west towards the city centre in the distance and the blinking mast of the TV Tower. Otto’s wife called him in the morning. She sounded tired, Markus told me later, but relieved that the journey, so difficult in its final stages, had reached its destination. In the end, she said, they had both been ready; a final goodbye and a kiss of cracked, dry lips to the sound of early birds beyond the hospice window, pre-empting the dawn. And then she walked home, eight kilometres through the early morning streets, sharing the pavement with newspaper delivery men, shift workers and a few stumbling drunks. As she approached the block where she’d lived with Otto for over forty years, she spotted one of the family of foxes who lived in the bushes close to the tram stop. The lights were on in the bakery. She could see Sophie, the daughter of one of her old colleagues, readying herself to open. Everything familiar, everything changed. Back home, she waited for the clock to tick on a little further before starting to work through the list that she had compiled only a few days before, but which she could barely remember writing. Otto’s brother. Their nephew. Then Markus. He was still sitting on the balcony when she called, watching the shadow of his apartment block shorten as the sun rose ever higher in the sky. He had been waiting for the call. Waiting for the permission, granted with the sound of her voice, to abandon his post for the oblivion of his bed, the final vigil complete.

Markus, Otto and Konrad grew up in East Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s, in different corners of the city. They met at the age of sixteen when they were selected as part of a representative football team invited to play a friendship tournament against teams from Poland and the Soviet Union in Minsk. It was their first trip beyond the borders of the German Democratic Republic, and they caught the train from Lichtenberg station, gathering in the gloom of an autumn evening with their parents, nervously meeting teammates that, in most cases, they had only seen at the trials and for a single practice match. They were all dressed in their new tracksuits, with BERLIN/DDR on the back and the state emblem on the front, and had been told at a team meeting that they were to see themselves as representatives, ambassadors for Berlin, for the German Democratic Republic and for socialism. Markus could remember sitting through the meeting, a few days before they had gathered at Lichtenberg station, but he had not really been listening to the speeches. Instead, he had daydreamed about the journey across Poland, about what he would see once they reached the Soviet Union, and about the girls he was sure were waiting for him on the grand, wide pavements of Minsk.

The journey was long, travelling overnight from Berlin across the Oder River and into Poland, before crossing that country to reach another border and a change of train wheels to fit the gauge of the Soviet railways. From the station in Minsk, they were taken by coach to a huge hotel on the edge of the city, where they slept three to a room. Markus’s roommates were also his midfield partners. Otto on the left. Konrad on the right. During the long journey from Berlin, the three boys had gone from wary greetings to the immediacy and intensity of friendship that only such travel together can create. By the time they arrived in Minsk, Markus said later, he knew those two boys better than all but his immediate family. By the time they repeated the journey on their way back to Berlin, he felt as if he knew them better than anyone.

When Markus looked back on the trip to the Soviet Union, football was only part of the story. He could remember that they won the first game, against a team from Poland, and then drew the second, against their hosts from Minsk, before being absolutely destroyed by a team of giants from Moscow, who seemed to belong to a different species entirely. In that final game, the job had been to limit the score and to save face against what was, until the final whistle, a relentless, un-fraternal onslaught. But in that battle, played in an echoing stadium of a hundred thousand empty seats, the bonds of friendship tightened. There was a photograph, taken by the team physio in the immediate aftermath of the final game. It showed the three friends arm in arm, hair plastered to their heads with sweat as they smiled toothy grins at the camera. Behind them was the pitch and a few blurred figures; beyond that, the low rake of the empty stands, filling the entire background with the exception of a tiny sliver of sky at the very top of the picture. A scoreboard in the corner documented their defeat in numerals, the team names spelled out in Cyrillic on either side. 0–4.

‘It was four–nil at half-time,’ Markus said, when he showed me the photograph. ‘A scoreless second half was our victory.’

In truth, though, Minsk meant much more than three hard-fought football matches. It was the summer of 1968. In Prague, Dubček was in the Castle. There were demonstrations in Paris and London, Mexico City and on the streets of West Berlin. In Minsk, the three young men smuggled beers into a chaperoned youth club disco, before attempting to smuggle three young women back into the hotel with a shining red star above the entrance. In their own way, Markus said later, they had been attempting a version of the East German-Soviet friendship, cemented a month before tanks from both countries rolled out across the cobblestones of Prague to end the experiment in socialism with a human face. The boys did not think of Prague. They thought about the girls and players from the other teams, the bottles of vodka and toasts voiced beyond the earshot of coaches and those taciturn men in ill-fitting suits who had joined them on the platform at Lichtenberg and barely spoke a word. One night, the team had to carry the goalkeeper to his bed. The next night it was Otto. They swapped addresses with their new friends, made promises to write.

‘Come and visit us,’ the boys said, to the girls whose names were lost to time, memory, and, scribbled on a ripped-open cigarette packet, down the side of a sleeper compartment bunk. Come to Berlin. It could be so easy. The girls couldn’t come to the train station to wave them off, although Konrad especially liked to imagine that scene. Steam and dust and revolutionary songs on the platform, tears in the corner of perfectly made-up eyes and a final swig of vodka to stave off, for a moment longer, the impending feeling of loss. Markus, Konrad and Otto slept all the way back to Berlin.