As they moved in from the east, from West Berlin, with three coaches and red and white and blue cars with music booming out the windows, louder than the huge engines, and occupied the village with the huge, imperious vehicles, nothing like it seen in the village since the Russian tanks, the din of the Luftwaffe and the Ribbecks’ hunting-parties, fifty or sixty gleaming, newly-washed cars on the three streets, and stepped out like millionaires with Hallo and cameras and immense sunshades and attracted first the children, but then us, too, gradually, out of parlours and gardens, and handed out beer and lemonade, pear schnapps, cocktail sausages and balloons, ballpoints and sandwiches and did a dance around a young pear tree they had brought and, after a short speech, which the mayor punctuated with his usual idiotic nodding, planted in the front garden of the nursing home which used to be the castle, and all the time looked more at the video recorders than the tree and gave themselves a big hand and clapped us on the shoulder, as if they’d just won a big game or set up their flag in new territory, and started getting louder and handed round the beer glasses and made us try the pear schnapps and it wasn’t long before they were behaving as if we were all old friends,
we were waiting to be asked what we thought of the new pear tree, because after all the village was famous for pears, and whether beside the nursing home was the right place for it, well if it is tradition, as the poet Fontane recorded it, then perfect, there grew a pear tree on the land/ of Sir Ribbeck of Ribbeck in Havelland, whoever couldn’t say the poem word for word, in the school where the coop shop is now, you got it from the teacher, one on the open hand with the cane for every stumble and every mistake, in the garden then, or, in three years’ time a strong young tree/ stood by his grave for all to see, should it be on the shady side facing the church, with its graves long since destroyed,
but nobody asked, and before we could find the courage to open our mouths the support was already rammed into the ground, the young tree tied up and the earth around it stamped down, the men with the tree and the spades photographed a hundred times and the watering-can emptied for the third time, they had even brought that with them, as a matter of fact it was their reporters who had brought it, who kept asking, What do you think of all this? and if we couldn’t immediately come up with a suitable reply, Don’t you think it’s fantastic? so that we could only say Yes, and give in to them, because they were so similar to our own reporters, who never wanted to hear a No, only answers that they already knew,
but I wanted to say Yes, a different kind of Yes, because I couldn’t understand the excitement and had too many unsuitable words in my head and celebrated along with everyone else, celebrated the beer and the new freedom to celebrate with whoever we wanted and whenever we wanted, and the inevitable unity, because nothing has any purpose, and we celebrated the pear schnapps and the shorter journey to Berlin, because only a few months before they were forbidden to stop and to come into the village and we were forbidden to talk to the strangers with permits that had been stamped five times and who showed great interest in the nursing home, which used to be the castle, and in the church and the ruins of the Ribbecks’ stables,
and celebrated because we’d had no fairs, no shooting competitions, no choral festivals and no big wedding celebrations in the village for decades, only the hunting society and the small-animal breeders who socialised among themselves, and the eavesdroppers, every group and organisation had its informer, so how in hell were you supposed to enjoy yourself, the disco every few weeks and the children’s festival once a year, and we all came running because there were sausages and sandwiches and beer and schnapps and coffee going for free and all the grim rules and bans were history and now we were freed so we could be unified and were being stared at as if we were primitives and because everything was upside-down and there was a new tree and we had to and wanted to get used to something new, but we didn’t know what, because everything had exploded in our faces, suddenly everything was so simple and nothing was certain any more, speech came back and with it a stammer and I didn’t know what was going on in my head and I began to relax and was surrounded in a way I wasn’t used to by a cloud of beer and schnapps and balloons which bobbed in front of the dull grey walls,
trained as I was to keep my eyes to the ground I tried to look the guests who were the hosts in the eye through their expensive prescription lenses, swaying and mistrustful and haughty under their sunshades in March, until I felt naked and impoverished and betrayed in the face of the hasty kisses and the pear schnapps bottles with brightly-coloured labels, but at the same time elevated and free and emboldened by them: come on, join in and have a laugh,
and so we gradually started talking and got louder and sang and drank because the ban on speaking and the ban on shouting and a hundred other bans had been swept away and the criminals kicked out of office at last along with the incompetents and the Stasi and the old boys in their clubs, and toasted the village of Rib beck and its pear tree and Fontane, who made it the most famous village in Havelland and was responsible for its sudden revival as a tourist attraction for complete strangers bearing cocktail sausages and pear schnapps and ballpoints, and thus lived on in Havelland, Sir Ribbeck’s fame and generous hand, the hundreds of hands, as if this was a film with the pear tree as the big star and us as extras, farmers and farm hands with smiling faces, and as if we still mourned for the Ribbecks like slaves or like children, and as if you didn’t want to notice that it’s a long time since we were slaves, or indeed masters, that we wanted to stay in the village and stay we did, to work, and let ourselves be yelled at and bullied and still worked the land like farmers and every morning at half past four up on top of the tractors all over Havelland, ploughing the fields, fields that belonged to us and not to one of the Lord Ribbecks of Ribbeck whose descendants are back, brandishing the name Ribbeck about like a licence and inspecting the barns and surveying the village with proprietary steps, making the ground beneath tremble,
like others who come and stand in front of the houses in their pressed trousers with their feet wide apart and go over the plasterwork with greedy eyes and folding rulers and record everything on video camera and take away what we built up over twenty years, an hour in a queue for one board, every tap bartered for, pipes got through friends in the right places, years of running around after rooftiles, every weekend hammering, fixing, painting and putting money into it, now it’s being valued by crafty lawyers or by those who are or were or want to be owners, everything has gone crazy, …
as if we didn’t know what everyone knows, that even the kindest of the Ribbecks was no magician who could build castles and stables out of cowshit, no, bent backs and silent tongues and eyes to the ground and doffed caps were what was used, until he had everyone under his thumb, even the most obedient coachman was beaten and tamed if ever he didn’t stop the coach at exactly the right place on the driveway, and as punishment he would have to drive around the castle and stop again in exactly the right place, to the centimetre, so that the ladies with their peacock feathers and the gentlemen with their tophats could step up exactly as usual into the coach before it set off for Nauen to get the train to Berlin, a crack of the whip and off into the delightful world of the timber business and Prussian glory, …
… may the mercy of the Lord be with you all, the pastor said at the end of service every Sunday, and the children condemned to sleep on potatoes until they knew the poem about kindly old Ribbeck by heart and became slaves and soldiers and swaggered around in the barracks with one or other of the Ribbecks and got to one of the lower ranks and went out into the world with the kindly old children’s friend in their memories, but they never found him, not even when they were lying face down in the mud, in the snow, in the hot sand, nineteen sons of Ribbeck gone to war,
and those who remained after the war didn’t have to doff their caps any more, took the few hectares of land, whether they had ever doffed their caps or not, and without a penny to their names and no machinery fattened up the cattle, now this was what you call freedom, ate potato peelings themselves and tasted hunger, worked their way up on treacle and bread and dripping as free farmers with productivity quotas and regulations for how many hundredweight of pigs to keep, and soon it was back to back-bending, for the comrades with the rubber stamps, for the directives from distant Berlin, as if we couldn’t turn the situation around by ourselves, but it got easier, being imprisoned in your own country, if you could just forget, and get used to not being used to the continuous stream of new orders, which were supposedly in the common interest but came from those who couldn’t harness a horse without getting a kick in the guts, who cut you short if your words didn’t strictly conform to the regulations of the Front,
and now you’re all here and I’m talking up a storm, I’m not finished yet, excuse me, don’t want to be a nuisance, don’t usually go on like this, have you anything else planned for this evening, you want to leave, you’re watching for a chance to cut me short, or you’re waiting politely till I get tired and can’t take any more, you’re thinking about the journey home in the comfortable coach, where you can listen to soothing or reviving music and recover from all these exhausting words, do you think it doesn’t exhaust me, so I’m not going to stop, if I don’t talk now I never will, because everything has gone so crazy, so quickly that you forget where your heart belongs because it’s thumping in every part of you, and soon we’ll be hearing again, just look after yourself and concentrate on getting the dough together for your food, rent and petrol and forget about your thoughts and what you want to change, and you’ll be getting cut short in the new old way,
you don’t want to go through that again: what you thought was rubbish, what you knew was suspect, and their assaults came down on you like rain, and you always had to be grateful that you didn’t have to doff your cap any more, but they shackled you with gratitude, until you were happy to sit at the steering wheel of the big tractor, to drive across the fields which kept getting bigger and bigger and to look out over the wide countryside with the dignity of a lord, the Brandenburg fields and the paths running along their borders, and to tum over the soil on everything that gnawed at you, and tum over the soil on the past, and tum over the soil on what was to come with Record Profits, Productivity Targets, Plans, until it was time to go home on 200 HP on the dot of five to the puddles and cracks and the low ceilings and to sink down defenceless in front of the TV screen, …
… and some of the better-heeled people asked the question that we had forgotten, the forbidden question, whether we and our mothers and fathers had it better under the big landowners, the junkers, and the forbidden question, what would things be like if the junkers had stayed, or are you not allowed to say junker any more because it could be a Party word, whether we would have had better roofs, more order in general and a nicer picture for us and your cameras and whether we would have been able to relax more often and had an easier time of it at work and with everything,
who’d rather be a good, obedient farm-worker in the world-famous Ribbeck company with a boss who sometimes doffs his cap to you when you come in from the fields at the end of the day, the cap is almost as much of a legend as the pears, but who cares, under him at least the harvest didn’t rot out in the fields, spread out four metres high, covered over with tarpaulin full of rips and holes, going to seed and rotting after every shower of rain, than a worker under the masters who claimed not to be, under crusty worklords from Berlin who’ve betrayed their ideals and mistrust you in everything and only believe in things they’ve forged themselves, figures, pictures, editorials, and besides the dirt and the rust and the fear have left nothing behind but the hate which overcomes you when you look at the faded office wallpaper and two metres up you see the white rectangle, because the kind of evil that walks around in jackboots isn’t the only kind,
… as far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to just forget about the pride, the small bit of pride there was after the land reform, when the harvest was good you were glad, and glad about your wife and children, who knows what we could have made of ourselves and of Ribbeck if they hadn’t pushed up the productivity targets so high, those targets meant you were never anything more than a potato-picker and never got any kind of satisfaction, no slaughter permit if you didn’t reach the target, how you cursed those scales, and the regulations, they wanted to plant sugarbeet in sand, worse and worse, till all the enjoyment was gone, one guy shit on the table, put his work-card beside it: that’s my target, and disappeared off to the West, and he wasn’t the only one, …
… Ribbeck has never seen anything the likes of it before, at first I thought the world was going to end, so many people at once in the village and none of them wrinkling their noses at the smell of silage, everyone shouting Cheers! in every direction, now they’re drifting back into the darkness, collecting up the sunshades, time to go, the last drops of beer squeezed from the kegs and no more supplies left, no more kegs being rolled out, the beer glasses twinkling white in the grass,
and me, where am I, you’ll never get me away from my Ribbeck and you’ll never get me to my feet again tonight, head is so heavy, think I’ve had it for tonight, the old brain is swelling and pumping and soaking up all this stuff it never knew before and the next second, as the cranes cry out overhead, spits it out again, thoughts are turning into words too quickly and I’m talking like I’ve never done before, Come have a pear, his friendly voice would urge, once upon a time, who’s that whispering there, …
it’s not that easy to climb into your boat, to slip into your skin, or for you to slip into ours, we provide the pears and you fuck them, oh pardon me, I shouldn’t use dirty words like ‘you’ and ‘us’ any more, we’re agreed on that, fair enough, …
so here we are, boss, you and me, the last guests, among the leaves there is a voice, a loud one at that, but they were wrong, because their friend/ made sure his bounty would not end, no, not then, but now, what now…