Better Than Fiction Page 4

  I knew it would open out at some point, and it did. The tunnel emerged at a massive rock chamber, high-ceilinged, with a lumpy, rubble-strewn floor and a wooden hut standing over to one side. The hut had a window with, I think, a sill, and there were corrugated-iron sheets lying around, and passages going off to the side. I looked into the shed, just a shell, then wandered around shining the flashlight into other cave-like places, one that was like a big circle, another low and poky and full of rubble. A wheelbarrow had rusted away to lace. A big beam of wood about eight feet long lay across the floor, and there were traces of narrow tram lines, dusted over, heading away into some dark side place. It was surprisingly unclaustrophobic. Where it was high, it was like being in a cathedral; where it was low, I didn’t go. And mostly it was safe, as long as you didn’t do anything stupid. Some parts were clearly off-limits, places where water took over and the ground gave way. There was a wide slanting passageway, deeply flooded, spanned by thick wooden supports. The water was surprisingly clear. A ladder was visible down there, and a ledge big enough to stand on. The passage ran towards a far opening, low and overhung, like the mouth of a dragon’s lair.

  I kept oriented by constantly bringing myself back to the big open chamber where the hut was. Wherever I shone my torch, the rock walls were streaked and smeared with green copper.

  I saw light ahead and went towards it. It was falling from up high onto a rock wall, a bright triangular patch of sunlight that threw the jags of rock into high relief. I turned off the flashlight and approached with awe. A green cave landscape was illuminated, a copper lake of turquoise water that glinted in the sunshine, a small shaly beach, a far-flung outcrop of rock, almost white in the glare. You could get to the outcrop by going round the side and crouching low where the rock hung out over the water, but the ground there was scree-like and sloping and the water looked deep.

  I was underneath one of the big open shafts. The walls glittered. The water flowed out of the lake, round the rock and away down a channel about three feet across, meandering towards a grand arched darkness in the distance. I’m bad at judging distances, but you could have swum in the lake, rowed a boat.

  My exploration into the mine was the culmination of three days and nights of road-trip horror. Two warring couples in a car. All the campsites we’d stayed in were full of all-night revellers and I hadn’t had a decent sleep in days. It was so peaceful in there. I found a nice little spot and sat down to look at the lake for a while. I’d never realised how lovely a cave landscape can be. It was so still and quiet, and so light and bright even though I was deep underground. No moaning or arguing. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no comings, no goings, no bother. Now that I knew I was not going to be scared, it was wonderful to be in there alone. I ate some Morlands Munch and drank some orange juice and got comfy with my head on my bag.

  I hadn’t intended to fall asleep.

  When I woke up it was not quite dark. You could still see the light on the wall opposite but it had lost its glow. I knew where I was immediately. There was no confusion, but I did feel strange, and it took a moment to realise that the strangeness was the fact that I had just come wide awake from the best sleep I’d ever had. Sleep has always been full and crowded for me. I wake exhausted feeling as if I’ve been fighting a battle. Sometimes I feel I have to go back to sleep to get over the trauma I’ve just come out of, even if I can’t remember what it was. But this time there was only a lovely blankness. This is what it must be like to be normal, I thought.

  The light on the wall was waning. I had to get out quick before it got dark outside. I don’t know why, because away from the lake it made no difference at all, but I just didn’t want to be in the mine after dark.

  The flashlight made everything black around its glow, and what it illuminated was mysterious. But there were no problems. I got back to the hut. From there the way was clear in my mind. I did imagine taking the wrong tunnel and wandering deeper and deeper into a maze, deeper and deeper underground, but the thing about fear is to just carry it along with you and let it be, and soon I was walking back along the straight track out of the mine. With every step the darkness increased at my back and I felt more and more impressed with my own bravery.

  When I emerged at last on the hillside it was with a great rush of elation. There was a light rain and the sun and the moon were in the sky together, one coming up from behind the mountains, the other going down over the crags at sea. A light on the biggest crag winked steadily on and off. The heaps of mineral bores all around the mine entrance shone. When they were wet they changed completely, the colours came alive and glowed. I picked one up to take with me and walked down the hill to the chaos I’d left behind, only to find that it had dissipated in the hours I’d spent in the mine, as if some malign shadow had passed away while I slept.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  A few years after this I went to live in Allihies. I went into the mine again several times but always with other people, and it was never quite the same. Sometimes there were children whooping and shouting, or people running up the mountain to drop things down the open shaft while their friends stood below cheering when something splashed into the water.

  I returned to London after eight years, having learned that moving to a place you fall in love with on holiday can be like falling for someone you’ll always love but can’t live with. Things have changed a lot. The village has turned into a beautiful rainbow of fresh paint, and the tourists come. Folkmusic sessions sound from the pubs and spill outside on summer evenings. The bars have modernised, and Mrs Terry’s shop is now a supermarket. You get a trolley and push it up and down the aisles.

  The main entrance to the mine has been closed off. There are tough barbed-wire fences round all the big open shafts. On the edge of the village there’s a ruined chapel that’s been turned into the Allihies Copper Mine Museum. You can pick up a map and walk the two-mile mining trail, taking in the ruined village, the two big engine houses and the powder magazine.

  But you can’t go in the mines any more.

  The Tin Can

  BY TOM CARSON

  Tom Carson is the author of the novels Gilligan’s Wake (a New York Times Notable Book of The Year for 2003) and Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter. A two-time National Magazine Award winner during his stint as Esquire magazine’s ‘Screen’ columnist, he has been nominated twice more in his current day job as GQ’s culture critic. He was formerly a staff writer at the Village Voice and LA Weekly, and has written on pop culture, politics and other topics for publications ranging from the Atlantic Monthly to the online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, Arion Berger, and their cats.

  The first dislocation was landing at Tegel, which had been in the French Sector and no one’s idea of glamorous thirty-plus years earlier. In my childhood – in my day, I almost wrote, certifying my possessive dementia – our airport had always been Tempelhof.

  Back then, it had been mobbed year-round by the Cold War’s human equivalent of Christmas ornaments: US Air Force blue and Army green, gladdening proof to my then ten-year-old eyes that home was where our military was. But Tempelhof was in disuse by 1999, severing a link to not only my own past but Berlin’s. It bugged me unreasonably that the Luftbrückendenkmal, commemorating the 1948-49 Allied airlift and equated by my ten-year-old brain with a three-fingered rebuke to the Hitler salute, now arched forlornly in a spot not many non-Berliners had much reason to visit.

  At least the Airlift Memorial still existed. Not so Pan American Airlines, in my youth such a symbol of Uncle Sam’s might that I had a terrible time wrapping my head around its having been a corporation run for apparently unreliable profit. To a State Department brat in the 1960s, it was cradle and church combined. ‘The captain has turned off the NO SMOKING sign’ was the only Dominus vobiscum to which my father loved giving the liturgically proper answer.

  Yes, arms and Pan Am I sing. Not my idea; it could so easily have been baseball or stamps. But as
Germans know better than most, most tykes dote on allegiances. My confused identification with the very Googleable ‘Panzerlied’ sequence in 1965’s Battle of the Bulge – a fabulously crummy WW2 epic I saw in a US Army theater in Berlin as a child – troubles me to this day.

  Coming back to Berlin was my default choice, not that reality had any options on tap. Given my imagination’s druthers, I’d have much preferred to be revisiting West Berlin, officially a non-place since reunification. When we Carsons had been stationed there in 1964–67 – in Foreign Service families, it’s always ‘we’ – it had been as arbitrary (geopolitics is like that) but concrete (well, I’ll say) as Disneyland. My love of Disneyland in adult life may not be totally coincidental. Neither is how it drives me nuts whenever they install something new there.

  Unlike my wife’s and my return trips to the Magic Kingdom – in the vein of Napoleon overdoing demonstrations of his Frenchness, I’d proposed to her there and married her in Vegas – Berlin wasn’t just a sentimental journey. For some months, I’d been brewing an absolutely grand novel based on my upbringing in what I’ve since grown fond of calling the superpower diaspora: Kipling Americanized by John Cheever, say. But postmodernized by Günter Grass.

  Because I soon learned that I am none of those writers, let alone all three – I’m still not sure whether Cheever or Grass hurt more – that book never did get finished. But at the time, I was sure The Tin Can (yes, I’m joking) would be electrifyingly goosed by a return trip to what I kept catching myself casually calling the scene of the crime.

  Our cab trip through a perversely jolly, utterly unfamiliar city wasn’t exactly frothy with epiphanies. By the time we unpacked in our pension off Kurfürstendamm, I was feeling panic about what came next. Considering I’d once spent three years here in an identical state of mind, that should have been the past’s first wink that not everything had changed. But it felt different now that my itinerary was up to nobody but me.

  Luckily, it wasn’t quite. To be a child of the Foreign Service is to be a nugget in a charm bracelet of helpful oldsters. Partly to keep company with eine alte Berlinerin we’ll call Marlene Richdiet, my dad’s dapper onetime colleague Alex March (OK, so that alias is a bit Jamesian) had retired to Berlin. Hearing that Jim and Ginny’s fortysomething son was in town to do the Mairzy-Doatsagainst-the-current bit, he volunteered himself and his car.

  On our first night, he took us to the reunited city’s idea of the ne plus ultra in chic pizza. Considerate of tourism’s ideal – exoticized familiarity – was he trying to soften our landing? No idea. But as I tucked in, it crossed my mind that I’d never had pizza in Berlin before. I’m not even sure I’d known what it was.

  That wasn’t because my years there had been short on American or even ‘American’ food. I ate more baloney in Berlin than I ever will again. But at the PX cafeteria, my big sister’s and my idea of genuine (like we’d know) back-home treats were Sloppy Joes and milkshakes. I love telling anhedonic lefties that the US Army makes the best milkshakes in the world.

  Between gentlemanly recollections of my childhood I’d just as soon my wife hadn’t heard – ‘God, how you loved playing soldier. All those guns! What did they call those miniature fatigues the PX sold, “Just Like Dad’s”?’ – Alex filled us in that we might have to cope on our own for a day or two. But now I could handle it. Anyone who read Kim and The Jungle Book young enough to know they’re two versions of the same story will understand that all I’d needed to hear was ‘Bagheera loved thee.’

  So we set out. I had to see the Brandenburg Gate – see all of it, I mean. My 1966 view had been obstructed by the Wall, my diminutive height and my mother’s ushering gestures for her Kodak’s benefit. Imagine how superstitiously I touched one of its columns as I walked through it for the first time. Yet myriad bustling Berliners seemed already inured to that miracle.

  My wife was more interested in the flea market in the Reichstag’s shadow. But I scored the best find: a cigarette case delineating the old Allied sectors. Pretty cheap, too, since no one else wanted it.

  A Wall-belted no-man’s-land in my youth, Potsdamer Platz was where either the present’s surrealism or my past’s ur-surrealism sank in. More construction cranes than I’d ever seen in one place were turning the sky into trigonometry lessons. Unmarked, natürlich, was Berlin Mitte’s version of ‘The Princess and the Pea’ – the site of Hitler’s bunker.

  We were proceeding fishhook fashion, bringing us next to Friedrichstrasse. But there was nothing I recognized from my nervous back-seat rides through Checkpoint Charlie past our MPs’ beckoning versions of Christmas Yet to Come. I had to settle for a museum.

  Said museum – the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie – did kind of put my nose out of joint until I moved it back. Its exhibits kept me aware of how the Cold War seemed to Germans to be one more thing that had happened to Germans. Not Americans – or Brits, or even French. Or our WW2 allies turned rivals, save only an alcove exhibiting priceless but cheap Soviet schlock.

  The retrospectively mocking reproductions of the USSR’s war memorial in Treptow gave me mixed feelings, since the original is kitsch that stills mockery. A ridiculous 80-foothigh allegorical statue of Stalin’s knightly Russia saving baby (East) Germany after stabbing the Fascist beast, it overlooks the mass graves of 20,000 Russian dead. If my childhood fixation on all things warlike eventually mutated into a lifelong fascination with 20th-century history, credit my accidental kindergarten.

  Nearer my family’s old Zehlendorf neighborhood, I soon found myself on Clayallee, gazing upon the now pointlessly huge headquarters of U.S. Mission, Berlin – my version of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. The concrete sentry boxes once manned by silver-helmeted MPs were still technically ours, but empty. So far as I could tell, the final commander of the Berlin Brigade might as well have been General Boo Radley.

  Across the street was the Outpost Theater. There I’d popcorned my imminently four-eyed way through not only Battle of the Bulge but the forgotten likes of Up from the Beach, The Young Warriors, and Flight from Ashiya. The latter are three very real 1960s movies you can’t Netflix, because Hollywood’s dregs were what we got and we didn’t know it. Is it really any wonder that I’ve ended up making my living as a movie critic? But the Outpost was the 1999 site of the future Allied Museum, inaccessible except for glimpses behind fencing of snub-nosed old planes from Lüftbrucke days in its former parking lot.

  It wasn’t all This Was Your Life, though. Because my wife loves German Expressionist painters in general and Kirschner in particular, we had to go to the Brücke-Museum in Dahlem. That put us near the villa where the Final Solution had been decided upon in 1942, so we made a spousal afternoon of it. When we had tea with Marlene Richdiet, Alex’s Berlinerin, our coos about the Brücke-Museum all but had her reaching for the chloroform. Hearing we’d visited the site of the Wannsee Conference impressed her more: ‘Not many do.’

  Puzzled, I bit my tongue. What was there to care about in Berlin, I’d almost asked, except history? Kirschner’s, Adolf Eichmann’s. Willy Brandt’s and JFK’s. Mine. The city’s obstinate pretense that its present tense mattered more chafed me like seeing one-size-too-small lederhosen on an elderly cheerleader. As Nick Lowe once put it, I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll.

  I also needed Alex March’s help with my two Grails. First, I wanted to see my old school. Second, if at all possible, I wanted to not only see but get inside our old house.

  So I’d better explain about my school: the Lycée Franco-Allemande de Berlin, right next to Tegel. Mom and Dad’s claim that pride in their kids mastering French in our previous post in West Africa made them eager to preserve our command of the language was a half-truth at best. My self-made parents were the worst kind of snobs – namely, inept ones. They purely hated the idea of us mingling with the GI enlisted men’s roughhouse kids in our own sector.

  That’s one way Kipling comes in, I guess. One of my favorite stories in The Jungle Book is ‘Her Majesty’
s Servants,’ all about various camp animals bickering over who’s got pride of place. The Kiplingesque joke is that they’re all identifying themselves with their various masters; the Kiplingesque cruelty is the equation of India with a zoo. But Foreign Service children are always somewhere in between. Not long ago, I was speechless with envy when I met a fellow State Department brat who’d done time in Lahore – and who had, therefore, actually straddled the great cannon known as Zam-Zammah, as Kim did in his eponymous novel’s opening scene. I mean, to most of us – Berlin alums included – sitting astride Zam-Zammah is a metaphor. Maybe the ultimate one for our kind.

  Anyhow, my miseries at the Lycée had been so unspeakable I still can’t talk about them. (Yes, that’s my attempt at channeling Sam Goldwyn.) I used to literally barricade my bedroom door in vain attempts to stop my mom from breaking in and dragging me there. After yet another day of stammering hell, I’d give myself over to the quasi-maternal consolations of Petula Clark crooning ‘Downtown’ on the Armed Forces Network. Of course I wanted to see my blacking factory.

  Alex’s car dutifully put-putted Tegelward, but then we got lost. Alone among the Western Powers, the French had rechristened all the streets in what they called – how vengeful can you get? – the Quartier Napoléon. Now they’d been de-christened again.

  When we found what seemed to be my Lycée, it was just another dreary 1960s building without a purpose. Shuttered and inaccessible, no doubt bound for demolition. My wife and Alex were both polite as I grasped after some sort of full-circle emotion and found none. Stupid waste of a morning, really. The only way I could have reconnected with my past was by getting mugged there, but that didn’t happen either.