I investigated how well the law is enforced by tracking the wall on foot until I actually bumped into the side of a
building on Ebert Strasse. I then entered a small restaurant and followed the wall’s path under tables that were
being set up for the evening’s dinner crowd.
As people casually dined in the restaurant that night, I wondered how many, if any, were aware of the ghosts
of the Berlin Wall directly beneath their feet. The postcard images I had seen earlier—barbed wire, guard towers,
and GDR soldiers patrolling with rifles—moved through my mind, superimposed on the restaurant, where
everyone was welcome and safe, where the legs of patrons’ chairs and tables sat on the blond wood stripe that
was the only reminder of the long-gone wall.
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Thataway?
Now that I had gotten my bearings as to the
phantom Berlin Wall and which side of it had
been West Berlin and which had been East
Berlin, I decided that it was time to see the fine
old palaces, monuments, universities, and
cathedrals along Unter den Linden Strasse and
Karl-Liebknecht Strasse in old East Berlin.
After I’d been walking for less than five
minutes, a bicycle taxi pulled past me and moved
over to the curb to let a passenger exit. It looked
like a small chariot pulled by a bicycle.
The white-haired bicycle rider, who looked
too old for such a strenuous job, appeared to be
in his mid-sixties. His round-rimmed eyeglasses
The Bicycle Man of Berlin
(continued)
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and thinness didn’t make him look any more athletic. His passenger was a woman who slowly climbed out. She
already had her wallet out and unfolded, and it held a decent amount of euros. They spoke German, and then she
paid him. The cyclist was thin and wearing a long-sleeved, V-necked wool pullover that seemed to be far too warm
for the unseasonably hot temperature. Then I realized that the sweater didn’t conceal that though he was thin, he
was fit and wiry. The shorts he wore showed tight, hard, tanned thighs and calf muscles that were strong and
sinewy, right down to his ankles.
I had already decided to walk the mile or so to the Brandenburg Gate, but something about the bicycle and its
not-so-young rider changed my mind. As the woman walked away after paying, I entered the cab from the
opposite side and said, “Do you speak English?”
He was perched on the bicycle seat with one leg supporting his weight on the ground and the other foot
resting on the raised pedal. He turned and said over his shoulder, with a German accent, “Ja, ja, a little bit. Just
enough, I think.” He made a common gesture for “a little bit,” holding his thumb and index finger barely apart as if
displaying a small gem or a coin. A little bit was enough for me, and as long as I was paying him to pedal, then a
little bit would be enough for him.