The border begins with the geometry of empty clothes.
It begins in the neat perpendicular between the balled-up socks and undershirts, in the angles of folded underwear, in the parallel trenches between the pants and the shirts, into which you stuff unwrapped presents.
No need to gift-wrap anything.
The border is ugly.
Its barracks are the scenery of a dream that smudges the ink of your existence as you pass from one state of being to another.
“Passports.”
The border guards’ badly cut uniforms have elastic hems underneath their waists like maternity fashion.
This is the only elasticity; nothing bends into a different shape, nothing gives. It’s all concrete. The faces are concrete.
The border doesn’t begin in your suitcase—it begins in the three layers of your mind.
The loose, superficial layer that fools itself into thinking that it doesn’t care.
The porous layer beneath that hopes that no one notices that it does care.
The deepest and hardest layer, if set free by erosion, will bare the filigree fossils of your oldest fears. At the border, you become a child.
The state’s hands rummage through your planned parallels and hopeful perpendiculars.
You are naked.
Your mind will remember this nakedness wherever you go. It’s the skin underneath your skin.
Nothing is a matter of course. Everything is a matter of power.
We sit in the car and my mother hands my brother and me each a peeled egg. She boiled them late last night, four eggs banging against the blue pot.
Eggs are special. We only eat them on Sundays or when we’re traveling in space.
It’s a seven-hour ride to East Berlin, and the egg yolk is green on the outside, like the patina on an old statue.
On Lenin Square, in East Berlin, there’s a nineteen-meter-tall statue of a man with impossible eyebrows.
“Who is this?”
“Lenin,” my mother answers me, dwarfed by the statue and the blocks of high-rises behind it.
“Who’s Lenin?”
“Lenin was a Russian communist.”
“Why was he so tall?”
“It’s just a statue. He had a normal size.”
“He looks like Emperor Ming the Merciless.”
“Who?”
“The tyrant ruling Mongo—Flash Gordon’s arch enemy.”
“Don’t say such things out loud.”
Lenin looks like a man who cannot take a joke.
My father’s smoke fills my head. We’re not allowed to crack the windows open because it’s winter outside.
We spill salt and the crystals glisten in the cracks of the backseat like the snow in the fields that line the Autobahn.
The smoke penetrates the fabric of my clothes, my skin, and finally I taste it on my tongue—the acridity of my father’s rule.
Every time he lights a cigarette, I bang my foot into his seat, just softly enough to get away with it.
Last year, my mother showed us a smoker’s leg in a magazine.
“This is what you’ll end up looking like if you start smoking,” she’d said, pointing at the picture of a putrid black leg. “They’ll have to amputate it.”
My mother eats her egg.
The back of her head is square like a Soviet statue. It’s as red as the granite on Lenin Square.
Whenever we cross the border to her homeland, she retrieves a lost power that pulls her shoulders back. She’s like a loose button sewn back onto the thick coat of the German Democratic Republic.
When one cigarette is finished, my father squashes it against the car’s full ashtray as if it were a spider that had stung his lip. Then he lights another one and puffs out smoke like grandmother’s Räuchermännchen, the hollow figurines from the Ore Mountains that burn incense, giving me headaches.
Children don’t have headaches, my mother says.
“We leave West Germany and enter East Germany, then we enter West Berlin to enter East Berlin. Do you understand it now?” she says.
My mother has explained it so many times, but I have smoker’s head.
She has drawn me a map. West Germany is carrying East Germany on its hip, like a baby, but the baby’s heart is broken in two.
That’s too sad, so I say, “It looks like a space anomaly.”
“A space anomaly?”
“Seen from Dr. Zarkov’s ship.”
“Who’s this Dr. Zarkov?”
“He’s traveling through space with Flash Gordon and Dale Arden.”
My mother shakes her head. “This is life, not science fiction! Can’t you tell the difference?”
I bang my foot into my father’s seat.
My mother pushes a music tape into the cassette player. A woman sings; her language is a different kind of smoke. English vowels and consonants curl into clouds that drift by without taking shape.
“After the Second World War, the Allied Forces divided Berlin into four sectors,” my mother explains all over again.
My father takes one hand off the steering wheel and coughs into it, making a fist. His back is shaking so hard that I think he might be coughing up my lucky penny as part of some terrifying magic trick.
I slip my hand into my pocket. The penny is still there.
Gravity keeps my father from coughing himself inside out.
Gravity: an invisible force that pulls objects towards each other.
In our universe nothing has more gravity than the gray planet of East Berlin, where my grandparents live. They cannot cross the border to the West—it’s a physical law. The day they’ll be able to cross the border, Newton’s apple will fall upwards.
“Four sectors?”
“The Russian one is East Berlin, the French, British and American sectors are in West Berlin,” my mother says.
“She doesn’t get it!” says my older brother, punching my arm.
I stare at my comic book. Flash is about to be gassed by Ming the Merciless.
I kick the back of my father’s seat. My hands begin to sweat.
I’m about to do something dangerous.
We enter East Germany, the German Democratic Republic. The GDR loves its people so much that it shoots them at the border when their gravity field fails.
At school, I tell the other children that my mother has climbed the wall. I have her scrape her elbows and knees, here and there. Cones of light sweep the no-man’s-land. Dogs are barking. My mother becomes the sly hunted fox of the Russian fairy tales she reads to me.
My classmates believe me until I tell them the truth.
The GDR deactivates an East German’s gravity if an alien from a Western planet falls in love with them amid the grayness.
German Democratic Republic.
The cloud of democracy has as little shape as English.
Both take something familiar and twist it until you are excluded—like an old T-shirt worn inside out.
“Are you still reading that trashy comic book? Why don’t you read about the real world?” my mother says as we get closer to the border.
She reminds us to put our western magazines out of sight. The glove compartment clicks shut after she crams her own glossy magazine and a newspaper into it. I push my comic book into my backpack.
The first border guard asks us if we have weapons or other forbidden objects such as radio transmitters in our car.
My father has squashed another cigarette.
“No,” he says.
The border guard’s eyes are opaque windows that reflect our faces; his nose is pink from the cold. He waits five seconds before he lifts his arm and waves us through to the next checkpoint.
My father hands our passports to the next guard. The documents have plastic jackets in different colors to tell them apart—like my exercise books. I’m yellow. My toothbrush, my washcloth, my piece on the board game, my courage. I’m always yellow.
The man steps into one of the many shacks. When he comes back, he compares our faces to our photographs and waves us through.
We’re on the transit route now.
The transit route is a wormhole that joins an East German border crossing point and West Berlin.
As we’re traveling through this wormhole, we’re not allowed to leave the road, except for short stops at the gas stations.
On the roadside looms the East German emblem, a hammer and a compass surrounded by a ring of rye, symbolizing the socialist workers’ and farmers’ state.
My father keeps a steady pace to keep the wormhole stable. If you’re driving too slow or too fast, you will be stopped by East German police eager to collect West German currency.
Wormhole travel is boring. I get out my comic book.
“I’m sure these two are undercover,” says my father as we pass a Volkswagen with two morose men inside it. “They have them all along the transit route, you know, East German police in Western cars. Everybody knows that.”
“It’s all Schikane,” my mother says.
My parents never use this word except when we’re in the GDR.
I vaguely know that it means harassment, but the word sounds more like the old dances that my piano teacher makes me practice, such as the Chaconne or the Pavane.
For me, the Chicane is a dance in which the leading person steps on your feet a lot. A traditional arbitrary dance that is only danced in the German Democratic Republic.
I get back to my comic book.
Flash Gordon is fighting Ming the Merciless in Mingo City. He has to risk everything, but Flash, his hair as golden as the ring of rye on the GDR’s emblem, will succeed because he is right and just.
I, too, will be right and just when the time comes.
When I look up, I see a tank standing on a tall pedestal by the roadside. I know this tank and I know what my father is going to say.
“You know its gun is pointing at the West, right?”
Legend has it that this was the first Red Army tank to roll into the streets of Berlin in World War II.
Maybe a legend is nothing more than a joke that someone took seriously? A man like Lenin, turning into stone instead of laughing?
Or is a legend like the first cigarette that my father smoked at the age of fifteen?
“Something I regret every day and I hope you won’t make the same mistake,” he tells my fifteen-year-old brother.
One legendary cigarette causing an endless smokescreen.
We pass the border from East Germany to West Berlin.
By the time we drive down the Ku’damm boulevard, the lights of the neon signs are turned on, advertising anything you can get for money—whiskey, cars, movies, sports shoes, fast food, fast girls.
“West Berlin, showcase of the West,” says my father.
I’m nine and I suddenly want all these things. I want them the way my father wants his smoke. I feel the pain I see on his face when he realizes he’s just smoked his last cigarette, the physical pain of knowing that the neon’s pull cannot deflect the gravity of the gray planet.
“Stop! There’s a garbage can over there,” my mother says, gathering her shiny new magazines. She looks at my brother and me. “Anything?”
I shake my pulsing head.
I’m about to do something dangerous, I repeat to myself.
Any word can turn into a smoker’s word on the other side of the wall, where it must be amputated before the sickness spreads to the rest of the sentence.
I think of the deep red of Flash Gordon’s shirt and I know that I can’t let go of it.
Nothing in the whole GDR is as red as Flash Gordon’s shirt—and they have a lot of red.
YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR, says a sign in four languages.
My father hands over our passports and opens the trunk.
We have to step out of the car. A border guard rolls a mirror underneath it, while another one is searching the inside, unzipping my brother’s backpack and mine.
I’m grateful for the cold. I can pretend that it’s not the Cold War that is making me rub my arms and stamp my feet.
“I’m confiscating these,” says the second guard, holding up two music tapes, TOP HITS OF THE YEAR 1982 and MICHAEL JACKSON—THRILLER. “This is forbidden propaganda material,” he clarifies, walking back to his shack. “Welcome to the capital of the German Democratic Republic!”
Flash Gordon, the savior of the universe, has made it past the iron curtain, all the way to the gray planet.
On the other side of the wall, the streets are the color of moondust. Old neon lights burn like stars that have already died. They are the forebears of the lights of West Berlin—the squiggly cursive of grandfathers and grandmothers.
We have not only traveled in space, but also in time.
East Berlin is West Berlin’s past.
Down the street is the Tränenpalast, the Palace of Tears, the border crossing for aliens who travel by tram or train.
It’s a place of warped physical laws. A place like the pressure of my grandmother’s last hug when we leave in spite of the gravity that keeps pulling us toward her, distorting faces into melting masses.
Amid the moondust, splotches of unnatural colors light a few windows in the blocks of high-rises—poison green, bright purple, and laser blue—colors that remind me of plastic see-through ice cream spoons.
My brother says, “It’s to stop nosy people from seeing that the people inside are watching western television.”
I don’t understand.
“But then people are giving themselves away by having these lights!”
My brother yawns. “Some of them merely have them because they think they’re nice and make a change.”
He’s right. The splotches break up the night like bright flowers pushing through concrete.
We turn into my grandmother’s street and she’s already looking out of the window on the sixth floor, watching the moondust settle, waiting for us.
I breathe out my father’s smoke and take a deep breath of cold air. All I smell now is coal.
It’s the smell of the gray planet, the smell of my grandmother’s fresh laundry.
It seeps through my clothes, my skin, until I can taste it on my tongue—the acrid energy of the GDR.
Here I am—an astronaut surrounded by cosmonauts.
One of these cosmonauts is a girl whose mother comes to see my parents.
The girl asks if she can take a look at my comic book. Her plaits brush against the pages as she reads. Her nails are bitten down.
“Why don’t you let her have it?” my brother says. “You can get another one anytime. She can’t.”
The girl gives me an expectant look, raising her fingers to her mouth as if she were about to chew them.
“Come on,” my brother says. “Don’t be so selfish!”
The smell of my father’s smoke is wafting in from the living room, mixing with the smell of coal.
It’s time to do the right thing.
Flash Gordon’s Adventure Behind the Iron Curtain. PART II.
The girl’s eyes light up.
Time stops.
Life is not science fiction.
I can feel my power. It’s a bright yellow.
I look out of the window and see my grandmother lug her shopping across the dusty street in two string bags. Anyone can see what she has bought.
“Come on, let her have it!”
I think of the guns, the tank, the emblems, the barbed wire that we have passed to be with her in her small apartment, on this gray coal-smelling planet.
The magnitude of her power.
My own power is different.
It’s my first taste—like my father’s first cigarette, the Red Army’s first tank to enter Berlin, my brother’s first punch on my arm. I can taste it on my tongue—the acridity of my own power.
I shake my head.
Is this how legends begin? A border checkpoint crossed forever?
My grandmother is looking up without seeing us.
“You’re the most selfish person on earth!” my brother snaps, punching my arm.
After unpacking her shopping, my grandmother hands me a piece of chalk.
“Why don’t you girls go out and play hopscotch? We used to play it all the time when I was little.”
“Hopscotch?” the girl asks, chewing her nails again. She is still thinking about the comic book, her craving as powerful as my intergalactic shame.
“All you need is a piece of chalk to draw the lines,” says my grandmother, “and then you hop and jump until you step on a line, miss a square, or lose your balance.”
We play the game again and again.
It’s so much harder than it looks.
Dounia Choukri’s fiction and poetry have recent appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, The Cincinnati Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review.
