I had a strange internal geography growing up. I knew, intellectually, that the USSR and Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia were real places (unlike, say, Greece, which I believed was a myth until I found it in an atlas one day). As a child of Cold War media, though, it was difficult for me to imagine that they existed on the same plane as the United States, however many times I saw Ronald Reagan on TV with the latest in a series of soon-to-be-dead Russian leaders.
In this half-imaginary Eastern Europe I’d created, the Iron Curtain was a tangible object – not the harshly-lit barbed wire fence I only recently learned was a feature of the Czech countryside, but a tall, solid sheet of gleaming steel, undulating across the landscape. Later, I learned that the Curtain was metaphorical – and I assumed that the Berlin Wall must be, too. I’d seen the checkpoints in films, of course, but that didn’t translate, in my mind, to a great concrete barricade, covered in graffiti and subject to being, quite literally, torn down.
But then, on a no-doubt chilly November morning, Jan was late to class. Jan was a German exchange student, and Jan was never late. This morning, though, he was, and when he ran, breathless, into Mr. Augustin’s Mythology class, his English had all but abandoned him. Mr. Augustin listened to his broken attempts to communicate his excitement to the rest of us, then spoke to him in German. A moment later, he said, “The Berlin Wall has been torn down. Jan’s parents called to say they’re arranging to meet members of the family who were trapped on the other side the night it was built.”
No televised image, no classroom discussion, no Hollywood movie could have made the Wall real for me the way Jan’s flushed cheeks and gleaming eyes did. And if the Wall was real, then so were the people whose lives had been affected by it. And if they were real… Then so were all the other people I saw every night on the news. I don’t know if I’m articulating this well – I’ve never tried before tonight, and sometimes it’s still hard to wrap my head around it.
Jan, wherever you are, thanks for that. You opened up my world that day, though it took me years to realize it.
Photo by abhijeet.rane on Flickr. The painting reminds me of Pyramus and Thisbe, though I’ll hope this one had a happy ending.
