Sylvia Petter
The Last
Birthday
© 1997 by Sylvia Petter and gangan books australia
Under the rigid gaze of the giant
bronze head mounted on its granite block, workers crissed their
morning trails like ants across the square.
Samantha Freeman alighted from the red and yellow tram that
brought her from her rented rooms on the outskirts of the city and
fell in step with them towards the Straße der Nationen. It
was 7h15 on a bright day in August, her first at Transinter, the
State Translation Office. As she passed the block of granite, she
winked up at the bearded face cast in bronze. Karl Marx did not
wink back.
She pushed open the heavy glass door of number 32. Making her way
towards the large oak desk at the far end of the grey marbled
foyer, she swore under her breath that she would have to stick
cork tips on to her clicking heels. She heard her heart tap
against her ribcage as if echoing off the marble columns in the
icy quiet. They certainly knew how to put you in place; the desk
seemed to stretch away the closer she got.
"Samantha!"
She stopped. She looked to the stairway coiling with its
wrought-iron banister down behind the left-hand side of the
massive desk. A lanky man in his early thirties came down, his
jeans-clad legs taking the steps two at a time. Peter Held, the
driving force behind her internship with Transinter, moved towards
her, arms wide in greeting.
"Samantha. It's good to see you." He brushed his cheek against
hers, once left then right, kissing the air in the customary
greeting of their Geneva days. "You found your way all right?"
"Yes, just followed the flow," she grinned and ran a hand through
her dark blonde bob as she moved out of his arms. "It's good to
see you, too, Peter. Well, here goes. My first day on the
job."
Peter ushered her past the figure seated behind the desk. Samantha
noticed the soft and ruddy cheeks, but could not tell whether the
uniform clothed a young man or woman. Indeed she wondered whether
the figure was real as it had not moved since she had entered.
They mounted the stairs. Samantha was awed by the wide corridors
and long hallways on the first floor.
"So much space, Peter. It's marvellous," she said.
"Don't speak too soon," he said, a smile sleeting across his lips
as he opened the third door on the right-hand side.
"Welcome to Transinter."
Samantha stood in the doorway and stared. She felt her ankles
dragging downward in disbelief. Where the hall and foyer had been
wide and empty, cooled in marble on floors and ceiling, the office
before her was an elongated cubby hole in contrast. Five wooden
desks were lined up perpendicular along one grey wall. They were
the sort of desks that could fetch an interesting price as a
1930's "antique" at the Geneva flea market -- that is if someone
took the trouble to do a strip and varnish job on them. Two
double-paned windows opened on to the square; Samantha knew she
would have to stand on top of the desk to see the blighting trails
of workers below.
"Remember when I used to sleep on that little desk in the attic,
Peter?"
"Old Herr Schwarz always saved the three-liners for you. But he
never could bring himself to wake you. And then we'd get landed
with them."
"You make it sound as if it was my fault I had nothing to do,"
Samantha pouted.
"Well, you won't have that here," Peter said.
There was just enough room to pass down a corridor between the
desks and a length of dark-grey metal bookshelves masking the
lighter grey of the opposite wall. The floorboards creaked with
every step as if to punctuate the sighs she dared not heave.
"I warned you it would not be luxury," Peter said. "But you will
have work. That's what you wanted, didn't you?" he grinned.
Yes, that was what she had wanted. To work, to learn, to use those
years of study and not lose them to the whims of strings pulled by
fingers she did not know. She shook her head as if to shake out
any wisps of disappointment. She would manage, she thought.
Anyway, once into the work, she wouldn't notice the dreary office.
She could even add some cheerful touches to her workspace, the
third desk, firmly flanked on either side.
And so she settled in to the team of five. Only three were ever
around at a time, with two being on interpreting assignments. The
three were Peter, Gudrun, a recent graduate who had moved over
from Leipzig, and Samantha, the only foreigner, the only English
mother tongue. At Transinter, one did everything -- interpreting,
translating, typing, filing. That part of it Samantha liked, there
were no elite. Or so she thought.
On her way across the square one Monday morning in late August,
she noticed three men huddled together. She assumed that each one
would soon be on his way. But the threesome remained, like reeds,
their feet planted firmly, their bodies swaying to the whisper of
their conversation. The following day, they were there again. The
next day there were two groups of three, then foursomes, groups of
five. The following week she was surprised to see solitary
tourists, cameras slung around their necks or held to shoot the
local colour -- or lack thereof.
It was late for tourists. Summer was almost over and apart from
Karl Marx himself and the Red Tower, the city's oldest building
with its burnt red brick guarding the other end of the square,
there was nothing much to interest tourists. But they kept
snapping their shots of the huddlers that kept assembling every
day of the week until there were about forty or fifty people in
groups of threes and fours.
One morning as she crossed the square on her way to work, one of
the tourists spun around to face her with his lens aimed straight.
The shutter clicked and in that moment Samantha felt what an
aborigine must have felt when the white man tried to steal his
soul. She shuddered as the tourist turned away, her identity his
booty.
Then one day, they all were gone. Just like that. And the square
again belonged to the workaday insect traffic. Samantha almost
forgot about the groups until they suddenly reappeared in twos and
threes in the first week of September to disappear again one week
later as suddenly as they had assembled. But that time, no
tourists clicking shutters.
Indian summer, a perfect time for getting things ready and having
a party. And the city was preparing for an important celebration.
Scaffolding was mounted to hold birthday flags and banners, flower
pots to hold late bloomers, chrysanthemums, those large flowers,
the favourites of European cemeteries. It was going to be a big
event like every 40th birthday always is.
Forty years. Someone had once said that the years before forty
were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Guests had come
from Bulgaria, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, Italy and
Britain. Seated at the festive tables on the second floor of the
town hall building in a patchwork of internationalism, they had
come from distant twinned towns to Karl-Marx-Stadt to celebrate
the 7 October 1989, the 40th birthday of the GDR.
Samantha whispered translations of welcome speeches and
acknowledgements to the assembled party guests. She sat at the
long damask-covered table between leaning ears and mouths,
separated by tongues that forked in their beliefs. Instead of
"Happy Birthday", a string quartet played Händel's
"Feuerwerksmusik". It was a sign of the new "rapprochement". Five
years earlier, those fireworks, written in honour of an English
monarch, could never have been entertained. That night though,
they lacked the pomp and majesty of the brass. Samantha felt
twitching and edging about in seats on either side of her as the
rising chant of "Freiheit" seeped in firmly from outside through
the sparkle of the strings.
The guests lurched left and right as if trying to escape an
irritating insect without acknowledging its existence. The chant
floated in on a glow of candles caught in a haze beneath the
window sill of the classic Rathaus building.
A worsted web of fear held the gathering in check like paper
blotting ink from seeping free. Samantha smelt the tension all
around her, as if the foreign guests were unwittingly exuding a
skunk-like odour of protection -- or was it just that their
deodorants were no longer a match for the late hour? They knew
they would leave the following day to return to the remaining
twin, their duty done in the name of socialism -- and anyway, they
had just come for the party.
Samantha felt the build-up. Actions had already started in
Leipzig, in Dresden. In Karl-Marx-Stadt itself, the old name,
Chemnitz, had been whispered about in the coffee houses.
The groups she had seen in the square had all been part of a quiet
restrained movement, protesting like a grasp beyond quickening
sands. Peter had told her that, despite what one heard in the
West, the citizens of his country had the right to apply for
permission to leave. Those in the square had either been refused
or had just put in an application -- for refusal.
"And those tourists snapping them. I wouldn't want to take
pictures of people huddling about -- some souvenir," Samantha had
said.
"They weren't tourists, Samantha. They were from the Stasi. They
were taking photos of the huddlers. They'll find a use for
them."
"Peter, the other day ... one of them snapped me," Samantha
paled.
"You'll be all right. You're a foreigner. You're clean," he said,
but his voice had become flat like day-old Coca Cola.
Sitting in the immense hall with its candelabra of cut glass from
the famous Jena factory crowning the stucco ceiling, Samantha felt
the progression of events and quietly thanked her tangled roots
for not having chosen this to be her country.
The congregation outside broke up softly with the snuffing of
candles.
It left the visitors on the inside the chance to leave with face
intact, and eyes unseeing. Already the next day people would lie
prostrate on railroad tracks to block trains packed past the roof,
forcing places to any Eastern border. They would close the
borders. Those that got through would claw their way to Western
consulates.
Samantha picked up her papers, slipped into her jacket and hugged
herself as if to stop her cocoon of foolish freedom from
unravelling in a country close to crumbling.
The story deals with the last birthday of the GDR. Parts of it appear in Sylvia's novel "Tillandsia" which is currently under consideration.
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