The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2019 59 Marta at the Book Fair Don Hausrath Leipzig, German Democratic Republic m y visits to Leipzig came about before the German Democratic Republic melted away. I loved visiting the book fair there, for any number of reasons. First, it was fun to visit a country that seemed to have been designed for a noir John le Carré thriller. Buildings still showed scars of World War II street fighting. We would drive through Checkpoint Charlie (“Sie Verlassen den Ameri- kanischen Sektor”) in our U.S. Information Service station wagon, its diplomatic plates bringing scowls to the faces of the GDR border guards. East Germany heated their buildings with soft, sulfurous coal; and, thus, even with your eyes closed, you knew you were either in East Berlin or your high school chemistry lab. Dance halls in the GDR appeared to be staged by a 1930s movie direc- tor. Men and women sat at small square tables drinking beer. Men wore dark suits and danced with their hats on, a land- scape of bouncing fedoras much like a snapshot of the interior of Union Square Station taken in the 1930s. Couples studiously followed Arthur Murray’s Magic Steps as they danced to “Begin the Beguine” and “All of Me.” Our booth at the Leipzig Fair was always surrounded by fairgoers interested in the new books we displayed, which were of course banned from GDR bookstores. We piled as many titles as possible on a couple of tables and handed out glossy posters of the American Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. These giveaways were prized in a country that did not then have access to such founding documents. We were forbidden by the authorities to sell or give away our books but turned a blind eye to people who wanted to “steal” a book on display. In any case, security was tight; it was difficult once you had snitched a book to get it out of the build- ing. Besides the casual browsers, there were serious readers sitting about the floor near our display, copying out sections of a book as fast as they could write. So it was that a woman of about 60, whom I will call Marta—I have forgotten her name— sat at our display each year, copying sections of books on American literature. She became a semiofficial fixture, and once I got her to stop long enough to share a coffee. Marta turned out to be one of those sparkly ESL teachers one finds everywhere around the world. During the conver- sation, she explained that, like her fellow East Germans, she could not get access to the modern critical works she was salivating over in our display. She wanted her students to update their dated English vocabulary. English versus American literature came up, and she said her dream was to visit London—a common desire of the world’s English teach- ers. “But I can’t ever get to London,” she said. “My father was allowed out of the country to go to a trade show in Germany, and never returned. I can’t leave because of him . That’s how it works.” And she went back to her copying. I later received a letter from Marta, thanking me for a book, The Word Finder , that I had mailed to her from my office in Vienna. After that, I never heard from Marta again. My wife and I left Vienna for Virginia three months before the wall came down, and two years later, when we visited Berlin, even the rubble of the wall was gone. I stood staring at the vacant strip and found myself thinking of Marta. I suppose she went on teaching, but I hope she finally got to London. I think of that gift of The Word Finder , and that sentence about “words that are evocative, that stimulate and unfurl the wings of the imagination,” and pause at “unfurl,” a word that has special meaning for those who have lived in the walled city of East Berlin. Don Hausrath was a Foreign Service officer with the United States Information Agency from 1971 to 1995. He was posted in Vienna in 1989 and now lives in Tucson, Arizona. No News, Just Visas Annie Pforzheimer Bogotá, Colombia w hen the Berlin Wall fell, I was one month into my first tour, as a vice consul in Colombia. There were visas and more visas, using counterfoils and a hand-stamped metal plate, frequent guerrilla-inflicted power outages and phones that didn’t give a dial tone for more than a minute after you picked them up. In Barranquilla in November 1989, the newspapers were full of the drug war and the fact that a girl from a poor part of the city was crowned Miss Colombia. No internet. I’d like to say I was a witness to this world-shaking event, but it took weeks for it to reach our media and to really sink in. And after it did ... more visas. Annie Pforzheimer, a recently retired career diplomat with the personal rank of Minister Counselor, was the acting deputy assistant secretary for Afghanistan until March 2019. She lives in Washington, D.C.