Russian Bayonets

Three days after deciding to stay in Berlin, I got a job at a language school in the city, which desperately needed an American full-time (American often being the more sought-after dialect). The best part of the whole deal was not only that I got paid to simply speak my own language to interesting people, but that the job itself took me to every corner of the city.

It wouldn’t be unusual to spend the morning traveling around the western part of the city. In the afternoon, I might take a series of trains, buses and trams out past the Russian army base to a large factory in the east, where 50-something engineers struggled to make sense of a world where their Russian was no longer needed. While telling me about decades of vodka-saturated business trips to the USSR, I would try to interest them in America (just don’t drink the beer!), with limited success.  But it didn’t matter.

I found living in a city with a Russian military base fascinating.  I never saw them off base, but my friends would tell me they were paid so little that the Russians could only afford to share one beer between four of them when they went out. I imagine this did little to improve their romantic prospects.  Driven on by their poor finances, the soldiers would sell what they could, and we would often find uniforms and other interesting items sold on the black market by the Brandenburg Gate. Once in a while we could convince a shady dealer to produce a bayonet, shielding ourselves as we slipped him cash in exchange for a knife. Eventually we had a small, but decent collection.

It was just another business transaction in a city that had lost its dividing wall but still had two distinct cultures and multiple occupation forces. It seemed so natural to walk into an army surplus store and to find fatigues, backpacks, and other supplies from the Americans, Brits, French, Russians, and East and West German armies, that it was hard to imagine that one day it would all be erased so completely that one could hardly tell they had been there.