"...ragtag conversations with no centre."

Hard to believe, but just the other day I heard someone on the radio say that the Berlin Wall has been down longer than it had been up. When did it go up again? 1961? And when did it come down? 1989?

Not many North Americans under the age of 55 know what it was to pass through Checkpoint Charlie, but I do. I remember. It was late November, 1980, and I was 18 years old, bumming around Europe and North Africa. Someone I met at a Mitch Ryder concert in Lübeck said, "Let's go to East Berlin," and I said, "Sure!"

The train entered East Germany at Buchhorst, a direct line to West Berlin that made an unscheduled stop at Magdeburg(?) to take on three tall men in sideburns and black leather car coats, one of them carrying a Jack Russell terrier, which he launched like a bowling ball down the aisle of our carriage. The dog sniffed everything -- luggage, parcels, crotches -- but found nothing.

We arrived at the Checkpoint the following morning. While waiting an older British man looked down his nose at us, asked us to "take the ritual seriously." Without hesitation, my travelling companion -- a Bostonian of Serbian parents -- replied "Go fuck yourself." The man produced from his trench coat a newspaper clipping: the face of a young woman, and below it, the day of her birth (same year as me) hyphenated to the day of her death -- seven days before.

The Checkpoint landscape was mostly post-and-barbwire zig-zags. Human interactions were more variable: for the American military, everything was a teaching moment; for the East German officials, they looked bored to death. We exchanged fifty West German marks for fifty East German marks, and were told to return the East German marks we were unable to spend.

The next time I visited Checkpoint Charlie was in 2002 -- thirteen years after the Wall came down. All that remained was the little white hut where we showed our passports. Surrounding it, a lot of signage, some of it memorials, like the cluster of chest-height crosses with the names and faces of those who died trying. I approached the crosses and my god if the first one I saw wasn't the woman whose face was on that clipping.

All of this came back to me after hearing what I heard on the radio. That it stayed with me had everything to do with selecting John le Carré's Smiley's People (1979) from the shelves of the Hornby Island Free Store. And that night, what I read on Page 42 -- lines reminiscent of our current moment. Smiley is pulled from retirement to verify the death of a retired informant. Immediately after that he is de-briefed/briefed in a safe house operated by a British intelligence agency.

This is how crises always were, he thought; ragtag conversations with no centre. One man on the telephone, another dead, a third prowling. The nervous idleness of slow motion.