A bus pulled up and she jumped on. She walked with lowered gaze to a seat near the back and covered her face with her hands.
She thought about their courtship. When she had raised the issues that had got in the way of her previous relationships – her feminism, her anti-Communism, her closeness to Carla – he had given all the right answers. She had believed that he and she were like-minded, almost miraculously so. It had never occurred to her that he was putting on an act.
The bus crawled through the landscape of old rubble and new concrete towards the central district of Mitte. Rebecca tried to think about her future but she could not. All she could do was run over the past in her mind. She remembered their wedding day, the honeymoon, and their year of marriage, seeing it all now as a play in which Hans had been performing. He had stolen two years from her, and it made her so angry that she stopped crying.
She recalled the evening when she had proposed. They had been strolling in the People’s Park at Friedrichshain, and they had stopped in front of the old Fairytale Fountain to look at the carved stone turtles. She had worn a navy-blue dress, her best colour. Hans had a new tweed jacket: he managed to find good clothes even though East Germany was a fashion desert. With his arm around her, Rebecca had felt safe, protected, cherished. She wanted one man, for ever, and he was the man. ‘Let’s get married, Hans,’ she had said with a smile, and he had kissed her and replied: ‘What a wonderful idea.’
I was a fool, she thought furiously; a stupid fool.
One thing was explained. Hans had not wanted to have children yet. He had said he wanted to get another promotion and a home of their own first. He had not mentioned this before the wedding, and Rebecca had been surprised, given their ages: she was twenty-nine and he thirty-four. Now she knew the real reason.
By the time she got off the bus she was in a rage. She walked quickly through the wind and rain to the tall old town house where she lived. From the hall she could see, through the open door of the front room, her mother deep in conversation with Heinrich von Kessel, who had been a Social Democrat city councillor with her after the war. Rebecca walked quickly past without speaking. Her twelve-year-old sister, Lili, was doing homework at the kitchen table. She could hear the grand piano in the drawing room: her brother, Walli, was playing a blues. Rebecca went upstairs to the two rooms she and Hans shared.
The first thing she saw when she walked into the room was Hans’s model. He had been working on this throughout their year of marriage. He was making a scale model of the Brandenburg Gate out of matchsticks and glue. Everyone he knew had to save their spent matches. The model was almost done, and stood on the small table in the middle of the room. He had made the central arch and its wings, and was working on the quadriga, the four-horse chariot on the top, which was much more difficult.
He must have been bored, Rebecca thought bitterly. No doubt the project was a way of passing the evenings he was obliged to spend with a woman he did not love. Their marriage was like the model, a flimsy copy of the real thing.
She went to the window and stared out at the rain. After a minute, a tan Trabant 500 pulled up at the kerb, and Hans got out.
How dare he come here now?
Rebecca flung open the window, heedless of the rain blowing in, and yelled: ‘Go away!’
He stopped on the wet sidewalk and looked up.
Rebecca’s eye lit on a pair of his shoes on the floor beside her. They had been hand-made by an old shoemaker Hans had found. She picked one up and threw it at him. It was a good shot and, although he dodged, it hit the top of his head.
‘You mad cow!’ he yelled.
Walli and Lili came into the room. They stood in the doorway, staring at their grown-up sister as if she had become a different person, which she probably had.
‘You got married on the orders of the Stasi!’ Rebecca shouted out of the window. ‘Which of us is mad?’ She threw the other shoe and missed.
Lili said in awestruck tones: ‘What are you doing?’
Walli grinned and said: ‘This is crazy, man.’
Outside, two passers-by stopped to watch, and a neighbour appeared on a doorstep, gazing in fascination. Hans glared at them. He was proud, and it was agony for him to be made a fool of in public.
Rebecca looked around for something else to throw at him, and her gaze fell on the matchstick model of the Brandenburg Gate.
It stood on a plywood board. She picked it up. It was heavy, but she could manage.
Walli said: ‘Oh, wow.’
Rebecca carried the model to the window.
Hans shouted: ‘Don’t you dare! That belongs to me!’
She rested the plywood base on the windowsill. ‘You ruined my life, you Stasi bully!’ she shouted.
One of the women bystanders laughed, a scornful, jeering cackle that rang out over the sound of the rain. Hans flushed with rage and looked around, trying to identify its source, but he could not. To be laughed at was the worst form of torture for him.
He roared: ‘Put that model back, you bitch! I worked on it for a year!’
‘That’s how long I worked on our marriage,’ Rebecca replied, and she lifted the model.
Hans yelled: ‘I’m ordering you!’
Rebecca heaved the model through the window and let it go.
It turned over in mid-air, so that the board was uppermost and the quadriga below. It seemed to take a long time to drop, and Rebecca felt suspended in a moment of time. Then it hit the paved front yard with a sound like paper being crumpled. The model exploded and the matchsticks scatted outwards in a spray, then came down on the wet stones and stuck, forming a sunburst of destruction. The board lay flat, everything on it crushed to nothing.
Hans stared at it for a long moment, his mouth open in shock.
He recovered himself and pointed a finger up at Rebecca. ‘You listen to me,’ he said, and his voice was so cold that suddenly she felt afraid. ‘You’ll regret this, I tell you,’ he said. ‘You and your family. You’ll regret it for the rest of your lives. And that’s a promise.’
Then he got back into his car and drove away.