Mama’s Cold War

by Hugh Todd

I was ten when the Bernin wall went up. All the adults talked about it. Mama especially. Mama, for whom the wall was a continuing affront for twenty-eight years.

You're maybe wondering, what do I mean, the Bernin Wall? Well, this was the wall that divided us, the East Germans, from our cousins in the capitalist west. It also divided Mama from the apple trees over the road.

All her life Mama had eaten the fruit of those trees, which had been planted by her maternal grandfather Horst Jürgens. She burned with indignation to see capitalist boys and girls raiding their bounty, at the time of year when she would have been stacking apples in wooden racks in the storehouse, or slicing and packing them into her lovingly collected set of preserving jars.

I can see you’re still a little puzzled. You might be thinking, were her thoughts not capitalist, rooted in notions of private ownership? And, indeed, this was the very nub of her irritation. For here was she, forced to bear the privations and intrusions of her communist world, forced even to endure the loss of the fruit of her own trees, while the children over the wall, clearly prospering under capitalism, were free to practise communal sharing with that same crop. It was too galling.

Bernin, as you may have guessed, is not a large place. I'm talking about our Bernin, not the other one, which is in France — and not very big either, come to that. So it was very unfortunate that the border determined by Churchill, Stalin and co after that terrible war in the 40s should have divided our town neatly in two.

For a number of years this did not matter too much. The villagers of Bernin were not great travellers, and life there went on pretty much as before. Apart, that is, from the checkpoint in the middle of the village square, where uniformed lads from east and west played cards with each other while the villagers went about their self-sufficient business. Bernin was not on the way to anywhere, so it was rare for an out-of-towner to stray our way trying to cross the border, and even rarer for any officials to come and check on the efficiency of our border patrol. Looking back on things, I suppose the local cadres must have been less than zealous in their implementation of collectivisation and other communist programmes. Mama and her family just went on crossing the road and picking the apples every year. Until 1961.

You probably know what happened in 1961. That was the year that a wall went up around West Berlin, because so many people were jumping on the underground and simply taking the train to the West. Of course, that wasn't the official reason in the East. We were told that the wall had gone up to stop the fascist spies from using West Berlin’s location deep in the GDR to uncover the secrets of our glorious communist success.

Perhaps you are wondering what this had to do with Bernin. The answer is that suddenly our little hamlet came to the attention of a lot of people who wanted to leave East Germany, and who realised that we may be the last way out. And the result of that was that the GDR and Russian authorities also noticed us, and our free and easy days came to an end. In a way we were lucky, because most of the villages divided by the wall had been evacuated, at least on the eastern side, where they fell within the Protection Zone. As I say, I can only assume that we were spared such measures because we were so inconspicuous.

There had always been an old dry stone wall bordering Mama's family's orchard, but now, without consultation, it was topped with barbed wire, and lights were installed along its length so that no spies could cross from the wicked west. The lights shone into Mama and Papa’s bedroom window upstairs, and made them both even more grumpy until they blocked out the light with a sheet of cardboard (which Papa later replaced with wooden shutters). The barricade went up in September of that year, a short time after the construction of the Berlin wall, and right in apple season.

When the wire first went up, Mama spent hours on a stepladder watching the orchard, particularly before and after school hours. When children approached, she would call out to them to go away. She told the ones she recognised that she would tell their parents they had been stealing apples. It did not take long, however, for the children to realise that Mama had no power of enforcement, and they began shouting back rude comments and making obscene gestures. In actual fact, Mama probably made things worse than they would have been, for when the children realised that the owner of the orchard was on the other side of the border and could not reach them, their plundering became completely unabashed, and soon their friends and families joined them.

For a while one or two of Mama’s old acquaintances from the other side would come early in the morning, pick a few apples and pop them over the wall for Mama, but this was not easy to do. They either had to get under the wire, which was uncomfortable, or wrap the fruit in padding and throw it over the top, which more often than not led to damage to the fruit, snagging on the wire or landings on neighbours' roofs or front lawns. Not to mention the Naumans’ broken window.

The following year, Mama’s activities attracted the attention of the Stasi, who picked her up and grilled her about her interest in the goings-on of our Western neighbours. They confiscated Papa's binoculars, which she had been using to identify thieving children, and the notebook in which she had been jotting down their names. Quite how many forensic tests and decrypting processes they applied to the notebook I don't know, but eventually they lost interest and left Mama in peace.

This did not mollify Mama, who wondered which of our neighbours had been the informer. (In case you’re wondering, no, it wasn’t the Naumans, who were good friends. It was Helga Krieg, who was hit by a rotten apple hurled by one of the child thieves. This was revealed finally in the 90s, when the Stasi files were exposed, and by which time crabby old Helga was beyond retribution.)

It was after this, I suspect, that Mama realised that she would have to be more inventive and clandestine if she was to protect her orchard from predation.

Mama’s special concern for the apples involved family relations. Her cousins the Wechslers lived on the western side and their interest in the orchard had been long and ill-concealed. Mama worried that  with the wall as a pretext the Wechslers might lay claim to the land, and that she would lose more than the apple crop.

‘They would cut down the apple trees,’ she said. ‘They’d cut them down and replace them with town houses to sell off for a fat profit. Their type, they don’t like to care for growing things, not when they can just go to the shop and buy them in neat and tidy bags. But money…’ and here she would lift her chin in a frown of disapproval and rub her forefinger and thumb together.

I’m not sure now that Mama’s fears in this direction were realistic, because access to the orchard was not straightforward on the western side. The road, which was now wholly on our side of the border, had been the means of entry to the place. The only other way to reach it was via a narrow walking track running over the hill from the public park further to the west. Even this was disputed by the landowner who had been a friend of Mama’s family and who let his German Shepherds roam the place whenever he was in the vicinity, as a gesture of solidarity.

Looking back on it now, I am amazed that Mama’s vigilance and rage about the place never abated. It was a constant of her life and ours.

One year she made up paint bombs, using balloons and water-based paint, and used a catapult made by Papa to send them over the wall. Her intention was to make the apples unpalatable to the children. To our surprise and delight she disturbed a courting couple who leapt up out of the long grass completely naked, apart from the long purple streaks covering their skin, looked wildly around, grabbed their clothes and ran for it, just as a yellow bomb hit a branch overhead and covered them with spots. Mama saw none of this from the front lawn where she was launching her missiles (in amongst the juniper bushes), but Tomas Nauman and I watched it all goggle-eyed from an upstairs window.

Another year she managed to persuade the local cadre to erect a loudspeaker broadcasting communist propaganda into the orchard, until we grew so sick of it that we deputed Papa to go and suggest that they might like to install it where it would be heard by a greater concentration of decadent Westerners. Mama refused to speak to us for days afterwards, until we pointed out to her that the apple season was over for another year and we may as well have some peace and quiet.

On a dark night when the prevailing wind was right she rained leaflets on the orchard by hoisting them in a large bag like a flag on a tall pole, then pulling on a string to release them. Battered remnants of leaflets clung to the barbed wire for months afterwards. She flew kites over the wire with loads of precious pepper as well as itching powder. Her old friend’s dogs were, however badly affected by one of these bombing raids, and she lost his sympathy and patrols as a result.

We children grew up and moved away, and still Mama prepared each year for the apple season as for a military campaign. One of her maddest ideas was to use a defoliant to strip the trees of their blossom in spring, but fortunately the logistics and material needs of this operation proved to be out of reach.

Then in 1989 everything changed. East Germany was in turmoil, rumours swirling, everyone discussing the post-communist order. Gorbachev’s Soviet glasnost had unleashed an unstoppable wave of change throughout the Eastern Bloc satellites, and nowhere more than in the GDR. Mama was determined that this was to be the year in which she regained access to and control of her orchard, which by now was suffering from an infestation of weeds and unchecked growth. She wanted to make sure that if the border re-opened she would be the first to enter her land and stake her claim.

The idea must have hatched during one of the blackouts our village experienced over that summer. By this time the Naumans’ son Tomas was in his late thirties, as I was, and he was involved in cartage. There were rumours that Tomas could get you anything you wanted, but if that was true he was very careful because he was never caught.

Mama was in a fever of expectation that year as she watched the apple trees bud and flower, and the fruit begin to form. We noticed it on our visits. She would look up from talking or playing with the children as if listening, and force her aging body upstairs over and over again to look out from her bedroom window. She must have been terrified that the orchard raiders would beat her, and that the tales of the end of travel restrictions to the west would turn out to be no more than hopeful gossip.

We were there during one of the blackouts. It was so strange. Our house, usually floodlit by the border lights, was plunged into complete darkness. I was startled by a cackle from Mama.

‘Isn’t it dark?’ she said. ‘I hope the West doesn’t try to invade.’ We all fell silent at the prospect, half in fear and half in hope.

And then, early one September morning, one of our friends called. ‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘The Bernin wall has come down!’

By the time we reached Mama’s place, there were sightseers and busybodies all over the place, peering at the wall, taking photos, looking a little fearfully over into the West. The wire on top of the wall had vanished. Some of the local teenagers were daring each other to cross over, and one lad suddenly appeared with a West German newspaper in his hand, which he must have filched from someone’s front  lawn. Mama’s face was animated by an enormous grin, and she seemed delighted to see us.

Not long after our arrival the police and Stasi arrived, and said a lot of stern things, keeping the curious at bay until workers could come and replace the wire. They interrogated all of us, but everyone in the street pointed out that there had been a blackout during the night and that they had gone to bed early and slept very soundly.

We stayed with Mama that day, in case there was any trouble with the authorities, but I think by that time they could see the writing on the wall. So to speak.

After lunch, Tomas Nauman visited and presented Mama with a steaming pie. ‘Heidi wanted to thank you for the apples,’ he said, winking at me. ‘And I’m grateful also for your business tip.’

I looked at Mama. ‘Apples?’ I said.

Mama put a finger to her lips and led us out to the storehouse. It was overflowing with apples.

‘Mark my words,’ she said. ‘Communism has had its day.’

And that is the story of how the Bernin wall came down, two months before the one in Berlin.

When the wall did fall in Berlin, a lot more wire vanished from the border zone, and Tomas Nauman became one of the first in the East to register his own business. Cartage and and scrap metal. Mama regained her orchard, which I was deputed to clear and prune. She made the most of her renewed access, inviting us for picnics, sealing up the old access from the park beyond, and putting up ‘No Trespassing’ signs.

When she died two years ago, we made a gift of it to the village, on the condition that it remain an orchard for the benefit of everyone. We asked for it to be called ‘Apple Common’.

We thought it only fitting.