You’re listening to RIAS Berlin. Radio in the American Sector of Berlin, where it’s a cool autumn 16 degrees.

  Happily, TV hadn’t come yet. Every day, RIAS’ weather report was 100% accurate with the weather in my town, even though a straight line to Berlin was at least 200 km.

  I dressed in the style of General Douglas MacArthur as he presented himself on 2 September 1945 on the battleship USS Missouri.

  Everything on me of course was Made in the USA. I wanted to separate myself somehow from the omnipresent communist rabble that often gawked.

  I always took to a little bit to feeling like Humphrey Bogart, even though the Iron Curtain claimed most American movies a long time ago.

  This time I was only halfway Bogart.

  The other half an American sailor back to his base from an all-night furlough, a wild night, which he had, in fact, spent… with whores.

  Everything offended and bewildered the gawking yokels. Bikinier! they would shout.

  Who knows why with such intransigence they insisted at all costs, and actually with relative success, to graft the attitudes of their once serfdom and their rabble mentality onto city life.

  I promised. I kept it.

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  I got to the ASSENTIERUNG punctually.

  Already by their faces you could tell these were not the nation’s leading youth.

  They had two tables set up in the lobby, marked A-L and ?-Z for registration.

  A petty officer sat at each table.

  Those that had enough command of the alphabet stood in their appropriate lines.

  For those less inclined to literacy, there was a lieutenant just for this, an expert on the alphabet.

  -If you can’t read, get tin this line!

  When I gave the sergeant at the A-L table my military booklet, he struggled to find my name.

  He found it at last, as the only name on a separate page at the end.

  -Brought be escort, he read, city prospective.

  The peasant’s complex and the cult of the city had been engrained in the national consciousness for hundreds of years.

  It was evidenced in sayings like “Let a peasant into the office, he’ll drink from the inkwell” or “Shit’s for a peasant, not a watch.”

  The jokes were common, and always evoked silly delight.

  -Get to the main hall!, our lieutenant, the alphabet expert, would yell on occasion, pointing to the big white doors to the main hall.

  When I came in, about three hundred men were already there. They smoked cigarettes, drank, shaved—they loitered.

  The mood was drab there, like a third class waiting room at a rural train station.

  Benches and chairs were strewn throughout.

  The din of the gathered was interrupted occasionally by a spasmastic, hysterical laughter, or by a sudden wrangle in the hall.

  There even stood there, painted sloppily in white, a piano, and at the back of the stage was a red canvas that almost reached the ceiling.

  The canvas was decorated in paper machete, a giant cut-out of Comrade Lenin’s head in profile set to the background of several industrial smoke-stacks.

  Stapled to the canvass were a set of white Bristol paper cut-out letters. They were once a phrase in its entirety.

  Many of the letters had fallen off, but one could make out that the theme of the canvass was ELECTRIFIC TION.