Boxes and a Wall

It was the second Friday in June of 1989. I was working in D.C. My wife was doing research for her PhD thesis. I was called to meet business people at the Canadian Embassy. Some companies wanted to introduce their cuisine to America. Is there a Canadian cuisine? These guys thought so, and it was my job to consider what they said seriously. If they want to market something they call a “Beaver Tail,” I find out what that is and report back to my bosses.

I’ve been to their embassy before. It’s the nicest one in Washington. This time renovations were underway, so we met in the secure area. Canadians—no worries--I signed a couple of secrecy agreements and Beaver Tails and maple donuts here we go.

All in the normal course of doing business with the Canucks. But then it got weird. All kinds of things can go in a diplomatic pouch: orders, memos, assessments, packages that someone is too cheap to mail, but why were they stuffing it with three dozen unaddressed brown paper boxes? Their security guy didn’t like it. “What’s in the boxes?” he asked.

“Need to know,” the delivery people said, which only raised suspicions.

“Well I need to know,” security said.

“You don’t have the clearance,” the other side said.

It was quiet for a minute, and I thought security was going to cave. He turned his back and went to a metal cabinet, which he unlocked. The deliverers got back to packing the pouch. Suddenly the security produced a bayonet and opened one of the boxes the quick way. That got everyone’s attention. But the only thing inside was a Hilo Hattie Hawaiian shirt. I ought to know. I own one of them. He turned it inside out and looked at it every which way. He shook the box to see if there was something else. Nope, just a colorful shirt.

“Why the hell are you using the pouch for shirts?” the security guy asked. That was my question too.

“Need to know, knucklehead,” the first delivery guy said. “Now can we get back to packing or are you going to try to run your bayonet through more boxes? Do I need to call a higher-up?”

Grudgingly the man put his bayonet away and locked the cabinet. I was having trouble concentrating on the culinary questions, but I took everyone’s business card and went on my way. It was just crazy. Boxes wrapped in brown paper, maybe a shirt in each one, important enough to send in a diplomatic pouch? Not to be shown to security? And a 'higher-up' knowing all about delivery? It was just too crazy to be believed. What could possibly be so important about those boxes? Did they contain microchips? Digital ciphers? Cold-war craziness? My mind ran with it.

Flash forward to Sunday night. All of my wife’s research materials are in East-German libraries. Can you believe that? Such a fun place to visit. Oh I tried to talk her out of that. “Isn’t there some other composer you could research?” I asked. “Say someone whose sources are in West Germany or Austria, or maybe Italy? I like Italy.”

No dice. She was going to work on Bach’s predecessor and all of the manuscripts and records were in East Germany. Of course she offered to go by herself. Really? I’m going to put my wife on a plane to travel to a police state? No, if that’s how it has to be, I am going too. Not my first choice for a vacation, but at least we’ll come back together.

We weren’t even crossing at Checkpoint Charlie. That would have been interesting. No, we were on a train in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. The tickets showed the crossing from West Germany to the East at a town called “Bebra.” Have you heard of Bebra? I thought not.

A few minutes before the border a couple of guys came into our compartment. They stowed their luggage on the overhead racks and each one left, in plain view, a box wrapped in brown paper identical to the boxes I’d seen in the embassy. Identical!

What the hell? My mind went into overdrive. If that was contraband or God knows what I did not what us to be in the car with them when the border guards came. I walked into the hall and checked out other compartments. Boxes wrapped in brown paper in every compartment, just sitting on the luggage racks. I couldn’t say anything. My wife was asleep.

At Bebra my fears came true. Border guards with automatic weapons checked our passports and inspected our stuff. Of course they wanted to know what was in the boxes. They tore one open. I could hear boxes being torn open in other compartments. Confusion. Laughter. “What kind of an ugly shirt is this? No one in our country would wear this! Warum? Warum?”

One of the travelers in our compartment spoke up. “Mode.” (Fashion). Much laughter among the guards as they ridiculed the American shirts. Much confusion in my head.

I resolved to say not a word about it until we were clear of all borders and guards. There was a checkpoint at the end of the train journey, a tall guy, bigger than me, sitting up in a booth eight or ten feet above us. I reached our passports and visas up to him and he leant down and scooped them up. He clicked the door locks shut behind us and ahead of us.

He didn’t like a detail on the visas. My German was quick enough to pick that up. It seemed it was already the next day since it was after midnight. He gave us a lecture on respecting the German Democratic Republic, then let us through. Why not? We were shadowed all the way to our official, state-sponsored Inter-hotel.

I still said nothing about the boxes and shirts. We couldn’t turn the radio in our room off, and one glance at the broom closet in the hallway had revealed quite the communications center. I was fairly sure the room was bugged, and every word we said was being monitored. I tried to forget about the shirts and the boxes.

The next morning my wife went to the archives and I played tourist. I left the really good stuff, like the churches where Bach worked, for the weekend so we could see that together. I decided to seek out things that were more run of the mill. I found a postcard stand. Good idea. I had to spend the East German currency we’d been required to purchase at the official rate of one West German mark for one Eastern, when the real rate was about 10 Eastern Marks for one Western. If you were caught exchanging at the street rate you might never seen the west again.

I looked through the postcards on offer. Apparently they had just celebrated a Karl Marx year. One of them had a picture of the East Berlin parliament with the caption “Karl Marx lives and works in our lives.” I smirked inwardly. They think he’s Jesus Christ. I thought, Sam will get a kick out of this one.

I asked the cashier how much for the postcard. She addressed me by name. Creepy since I wasn’t wearing a name tag and it was impossible that she would know me. Worried, I tried the same experiment at a “souvenir” stand a block over. Same thing. I was a known quantity. Things must have been slow in the security department. ‘Look out for the American. This is his name?’ Unnerving to say the least.

I decided the hotel room was the right place for me. Communications closet door open. Yup. Bugged. The radio was still playing. I could not turn it off and it was wired into the wall. I turned the TV on. Some kind of communist youth group conference, manufacturing successes this year. They couldn’t count profit and loss—that would be capitalist—so they measured how much material they used.

Lots of that going around, I saw. The television set was as heavy as a tank. The carbonated water was still fizzing away after I left it out the night before. The glass on the bottle was so thick and heavy that I thought if I dropped it on my toe I would have a broken foot. I was on edge. I went back outside.

And that’s when I first saw them. The streets were almost empty but there were three men, who apparently had nothing to do with each other, all wearing, yes, Hilo Hattie shirts. I resolved to keep my mouth shut. Best way to make it out and get back home, I reasoned.

The first few days of the trip passed like that. My wife regaled me with her research success—no one had been looking at these sources, and the material was terrific. I reported walking here and there, and I produced a few trinkets. The first weekend we attended a church service in Leipzig, right in the church where Bach had been the music director. A very special experience!

The second week was even more of a standout. A church in a very small town had a copy of the composer’s mass that no one knew about. My wife had uncovered it by writing to all of the churches in the country, as far as I could tell. We met the music director, his wife, and their two children, completely charming, and we came back to see them for three days, my wife needing to study and photograph the treasure they had.

The director had just been out of the east for the first time in his life on a brief concert tour. He had been considered a safe bet to return because his wife and children stayed behind the wall. He was completely curious about the west. How did I feel when unemployed Detroit auto workers starved in the streets? That was one of his questions. Did I really believe that the Korean Airlines plane that the Russians had shot down was NOT a spy plane?

We dined with them in their house on the last evening. The director’s wife said that one of her regrets was that her sister lived in the west and they had been unable to see each other since the wall went up, thirty years earlier.

And then time my wife astonished me, saying, “Oh this wall will not be up much longer. You will soon be reunited with your sister.”

In the summer of 1989 there was no reason to think that ugly wall, the scene of despair and bloodshed, would ever change. Surprise all around the table, mostly from me. On the train back to the west, we didn’t talk a lot. There were eyes and ears everywhere. But once in West Berlin, I said, “So, is there something you know about the wall that you would care to share?”

She was completely embarrassed. “I don’t know why I said that. I gave them false hope. That woman will probably never see her sister again.”

Short weeks later, on the ninth of November, the unthinkable happened and the wall came down. I told her it had to be the mysterious boxes wrapped in brown paper and the Hilo Hattie shirts. Whether coded messages or something else, that had to be it. She couldn’t see it, but then she hadn’t seen the evidence.

No one had an explanation for how it happened. And two weeks later my wife received a letter from the director’s wife. “My husband and I are so grateful for the efforts of you and your husband to win our freedom.”

My question? Boxes, shirts, and anyway, how did she know? She never managed to explain that…