Cole Beauchamp
1989: Every day is the same in East Berlin, until it’s not
Tuesday in September
I meet Jan in the queue at the state-owned record shop, Amiga, while Mother wheels her trolley to join the other faded house dresses in front of the department store, hoping for something to vary our bland meals of breaded veal.
Jan and I try to ignore the girls behind us, a year younger, still infected with optimism. They puff bubble-gum pink stories of Ferris wheel rides at Kulturpark Plänterwald in our direction. Jan eventually snaps, “What are you even here for?” He has no time for their cotton-candy happiness. His father disappeared five years ago. No visit in the night, no Stasi shadows, no neighbours with a grudge. Just gone.
Wednesday in October
There are the usual readings, Marina with her long wavy hair and modernist poetry. We have a thing for her soulful eyes and expressive hands, her brand of tough fragility. Not a clue what her poetry means. We chant Encore! Encore! even though it’s a Western word, rebels that we are in our Wisent jeans and fraying shirts.
Rumour is Amiga has a few copies of Madonna’s True Blue and The Ramones Halfway to Sanity. We agree to queue early the next day, in case it’s true.
The old guy with the freckled neck comes on. He’s supposed to be writing a novel but only ever reads Chapter One. We shout out the first few lines with him before getting bored and finding somewhere to piss.
When we return, someone new is talking, one of the politicos you always get at these gatherings. “In Poland, Solidarity! In Hungary, mass demonstrations! In the Baltic, the Singing Revolution!” We’ve heard about the 370-mile human chain calling for independence in August. People are emboldened, sensing Gorbie is on our side.
“Now it’s our turn! Down with the SED!” he shouts. We chant back, “We are the people!” There’s a new energy rising and we’re ready to bring the whole miserable lot down – our shitty prefab concrete blocks and blocked toilets, our Trabis smoking oily exhaust like they’re on fire.
When he finishes, the opening chords of The Clash’s Pet Sematary blast out. The whole yard erupts. We sing like we’ve written every word, belting out the chorus of “I don’t wants,” shaking our heads like wet dogs and slamming into each other. There’s so much to not want.
Thursday in November
Jan’s building stinks of pickled cabbage and sweat, but we can’t get any of the West German TV channels at mine. We watch a video of Wetten, dass…? and laugh loudly to block out the never-ending orange flower wallpaper, trapped in lines of brown leaves.
On the television, Thomas Gottschalk has the same long blond permed hair as the actress sitting on the sofa. Liza Minelli looks a right stoner. The Georgian National Ballet prance about and pirouette. At last come the bets: a guy who claims he can light his Zippo with an excavator’s shovel and a farmer saying he can identify his cows based solely on the sound they make chewing apples.
I like the farmer’s weary face and stained overalls. You can smell the manure just looking at him. Jan’s all for the pimple-faced driver of the excavator, the jacked-up nature of him, flicking his lighter and garbling to Gottschalk about what a steady hand he is on the gear shift.
We snort into our Pilsners. “Gangschaltung!” Jan pretends to jerk off and I throw an ashtray at him. We wrestle, elbows and legs flying, until I get him in a headlock. By then the pimple-faced guy has failed his bet and the farmer’s being blindfolded.
Jan’s sister Elise comes in and orders us to clean up. Jan washes dishes while I sweep cigarette butts into my hand, calling out what’s happening with the farmer. Then we swap. I stack dishes on their painted blue wooden shelf, above tins of Ogema green beans, a bag of barley, a packet of crispbread and two jars of gooseberries.
I make it back to the living room in time to see the farmer win his wager and become the bet king. We pop another Pilsner to get us through the government broadcast at seven, drab men in front of a drab curtain. I’m half watching Günter Schabowski read through his press release, half watching Elise’s thighs shift under her blue knit dress, when her leg goes still. “No restrictions on private travel?”
She jumps to her feet as the three of us watch pandemonium whip across the press hall. A journalist asks, “When does this go into effect?”
Schabowski delays, flicking through papers. He finally says, “As I understand it… immediately, without delay.”
“Holy shit!” Elise screams.
Jan and I look at each other, stunned.
I try calling my mother but the lines are busy. We argue about what “without delay” means. We switch channels. The ZDF news anchor announces that the GDR has opened its borders.
Opened.
Elise slaps our heads. “That’s it! Do you two want a beer on Kurfürstendamm or not?”
We run into the street, shout to neighbours leaning out their windows, hug people on the street. At Bernauer Straße, hundreds of thousands of people gather like it’s a party – clapping, singing, saying “Let us through!”
After three hours, the border guards simply step aside. Trabi horns beep; weeping grandmothers hand out flowers; Wessis pour bubbles into our open mouths; people dance like they’re on pogo sticks. We rock the Casbah, churn out that boogaloo and give it all we’ve got.
Five hours later, we stand on the wall like birds on a wire, Mauerspechte with chisels in hand, pecking away at brick and concrete, chipping off pieces of a life that’s already ending.
Cole Beauchamp (she/her) is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for awards and shortlisted for the Bath, Bridport, Oxford and WestWord prizes for flash fiction. She's been widely published in lit mags including New Flash Fiction Review, Ghost Parachute, The Hooghly Review, Gooseberry Pie and others. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children. You can find her on Bluesky at @nomad-sw18.bsky.social
