Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s funny to think that for people like my children, the Cold War is ancient history, along the same lines as the Vietnam or the moon landings.
But for me, it’s not history. I grew up, along with my sister, acutely aware of the Cold War. Unlike most Canadians and Americans, the Cold War touched our personal lives in very real and tangible ways.
My father was born in Slovenia, then in the former Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a Communist (Socialist, really, but I’m using the common terminology here) country behind the Iron Curtain. My paternal grandparents, along with most (but not all, strangely, but that’s a different story) of their children defected in the early 1950s, eventually ending up in Canada.
My sister and I grew up hearing tales of a clandestine midnight walk and close brushes with rifle-toting soldiers stopping to light cigarettes, of tears and goodbyes and bribes paid to guides. Of my grandmother bringing nothing but her silverware, because no matter where they ended up, she refused to have her family ‘eat like animals’. The stuff of Hollywood blockbusters for sure, but for us it was real. This didn’t happen on the other side of the world for us, it happened to our Dad.
The Cold War touched home for us every time we crossed the US border with my father. Despite being a Canadian citizen longer than he lived in a Communist country, he was always asked hard questions by border guards, and his eastern European accent didn’t do him any favours there.
My sister and I became convinced that we were being followed by Soviet spies intent on dragging our father back into Communism. We were acutely aware of nuclear escalation, and unlike our friends who dismissed the U.S.S.R. as a poor, backward nation not worthy of fear, we knew that the American powers were afraid for a reason. Nightmares for most children, easily cast aside in the light of the morning, but for us, this was reality.
It is not hard to understand then, why my family was so relieved when the wall fell, when the Iron Curtain dropped forever and we had finally seen the culmination of Perestroika. Glastnost even.
But it wasn’t the end of Communism that was important for us, though we celebrated it like everyone else did. For us, it was the end of fear. Even though we were both in our late teens by then – my sister was an adult, in fact – we still carried those fears in the back of our heads. Fears that at the border that we’d be dragged into a room and eventually deported to a country we didn’t know, fears that our father would some day go ‘missing’. The fall of the wall in Berlin let us put those fears down.
In this I think we had a great deal in common with those who were born on the other side of the wall.
I was walking along Gerrard street last week on my way to work when a strange thought popped into my head.
Where in the world is Holly Parker?
So strange was this thought that I actually pulled up for a moment to ascertain the source of this foreign thought. I shook my head for a second and kept walking, though I was no longer listening to the music I habitually have on while on my way to work.
I hadn’t thought of Holly in ages. Not since I was a kid, actually. In fact, the last time I saw her was probably something like 27 years ago.
27 years! Man, time flies! I remember being stunned, that I couldn’t actually believe I could actually say that – that I hadn’t seen someone in that long. But it was true. I hadn’t seen her in more than a quarter of a century.
Holly was the younger sister of a childhood friend named Mark. I hadn’t seen him in a long time either. We had grown apart, like people do, when our school district was realigned. Mark and Holly stayed at Holy Trinity, while I was shunted off to the newer, sleeker St. Joseph’s. It was just as well. Mark wasn’t particularly interested in the things I was, and our companionship had already started to fade, in a friendly way, by then.
I trudged along while the sun rose behind me, casting long, low shadows from the brown and golden leaves that lined the sidewalk. It might have been a quarter century since I had thought of Holly before but I was making up for lost time now.
Holly, like her brother, had been a scrawny little kid with bright blue eyes an incredible head full of brown curls. I knew their house – even though it was on Mill street, which my mom had told me was a nice street, even at the west end where their house was – wasn’t as nice or big as ours, and I knew that their clothes weren’t as new or fashionable as mine, and that they didn’t even seem to have winter coats that fit properly. And they were the first kids I ever met who didn’t have a father. I guess deep down I knew that I was much better off than them. I always had new shoes, and more jackets than any one child should have. And I had two parents.
Mark used to hate when his mother would make us take Holly with us to the big park to the east of their house, but she always did. No matter what Mark and I were doing, his mother would insist that Holly go along with us. I didn’t mind. I had an older sister, but when you’re ten, a 14 year old sister is almost like an adult. I sort of liked having a sister around to play with, even if she was three years younger than me.
Maybe the dry cinnamon smell of the fall leaves, or the coolness of the breeze against my cheeks, or the smell of warm woollen mittens brought her to mind. Maybe it was the angle of the rising sun, or the colour of the sky, who knows, but walking along Gerrard street, a hundred miles from the places of my childhood, I recalled the last time I had seen Holly.
I had pushed her on the swings while Mark slid down the zipline that crossed the park, yodelling like Tarzan. Eventually he got bored, so we had wandered off to the creek that ran through Rotary Park to look for crayfish.
I wasn’t much interested, especially given the chill in the air that made me doubt we’d find anything at all, but Mark was insistent. Even though it was November, and we could see our breath, Mark wanted to look. Maybe we’d find some claws or something, he’d said. I hadn’t yet learned to express myself properly, so I went along with him. Even then, I knew that maybe he found some sort of peace in sitting beside that burbling creek.
Holly held my hand while Mark jumped along the stepping stones that crossed the stream. The bank was steep and I didn’t want her to slip and fall in. Once, near the middle of the stream, he nearly missed his landing. Holly’s little hand squeezed mine tightly through her red mittens and she inhaled sharply, but Mark was a naturally athletic, and he caught himself with grace. He flashed us both an easy smile and bent down to examine the creek bed for signs of his quarry.
I remember Holly looking up into my eyes for reassurance. Her eyes were so bright and so blue. And she was smiling under the amazing mop of curls that peaked out beneath her Montreal Canadien’s tuque. It’s funny, the things one remembers. A Canadien’s hat, complete with red pom-pom on top. She was so proud of that hat. And I remembered that she didn’t let go of my hand again until much later, when we got back to the small house on Mill street.
After that, Christmas came, and I didn’t go see mark so much. I think I was a bit ashamed of all the presents I had got. I guessed Mark and Holly probably hadn’t been as fortunate as I had been. Then summer came, and they realigned our school districts, and it all became history.
Memory is an interesting thing. I looked at my hands that had held the hand of a little girl who was worried about her brother one autumn last century. That little girl would be a woman now, likely with little kids of their own. Hopefully those kids had it better than Holly did. I bet they did.
I smiled, I remember. I smiled, then I looked down the sidewalk, at the fall leaves carpeting the sidewalk. And I walked on.
It feels poignant, though perhaps only in a general way. Based on some graffiti I saw this morning.
Last night Sarah and I went to see The Toxic Avenger at the Music Hall on Danforth. It was a really, really amazingly funny good time. I highly recommend you get out and see it. The singing was great, the writing was fantastic, and the timing was brilliant.
Featuring memorable songs such as Thank God She’s Blind, You Tore My Heart Out, Big Green Freak, Hot Toxic Love, Evil is Hot and My Big French Boyfriend, you’re guaranteed to laugh.
See? Environmentalist messages without being harrowed!
Westminster Palace from the London Eye:
Westminster Palace from the south bank of the River Thames:
