Zeitgeist Zwei

It was time. Disengaging from her embrace I kept my eyes closed as if that would make the parting less real. It only served to focus on the fact that we were connected now only by our fingertips. I wasn't expecting her to laugh so at the sound of her unmistakable amusement I opened my tear gummed eyes to see her smiling broadly through her tears.

"If you don't get on now you might be here for a very long time"

I nodded my understanding. My voice was not to be trusted. I was too sad for an ill-advised attempt at levity. I was too in love with her to spoil this moment with a smart arse joke or throwaway line. My uncharacteristic silence communicated more to her than any words.

"No!..You need to get on that train right now!"

She had answered my unspoken question. With feet of lead I stepped up on the carriage. That seemed to trigger an audio assault of shrieking whistle blasts and the wet,sibilant hissing of air brakes. Katya reached up and pressed into my hand a small gold cross on a delicate chain. It had belonged to father and she had told me how much it meant to her. The train was already moving before I realised what it was. Contact was finally broken and I could feel a black hole open up in my heart to suck the light out of the world. She stood perfectly still on the platform and brought the light back to that drab communist station like a sun in human form.

I stood at that window for a long,long time.

Thankfully there weren't many passengers on the train that day and my misery and I had a compartment to ourselves. It needed the space. It didn't matter how broken hearted I was as I had to be mindful of the practicalities of my journey. Soon I would be enjoying the close attention of the dedicated comrades of the Grenztruppen der DDR.

By all accounts the Grepos were utter bastards. They were in effect prison guards for a penitentiary with 16 million inmates. Guards that would show no hesitation in pulling the trigger. They were Glasnost proof and impervious to the terminal rust that was devouring the rest of the Iron Curtain that summer. Not that anyone knew it but the East German regime had less than three months of life left. Even if they did know they were the kind of people who would have gone looking to 'get their kill in' before the end.

At the frontier the Czechs flew through the procedures. They clearly didn't give a shit and were almost affable as they checked my passport against a list on a clipboard. I had nothing to hide or fear but that doesn't mean a bureaucrat can't mess up your day. With a half nod and a yawn I was allowed to leave the CSSR. It seemd like hours but it couldn't have been more than 30 minutes before the train trundled across the border to the DDR.