Wunderland(35)
So when the Fr?ulein Saigon artist urged his audience to attend the next day’s demonstration at the Deutsche Opera she’d found herself leaping at the chance, even as Ulrich dismissed it as “more self-congratulatory exhibitionism.” And from the first jostling half step she’d found the experience exhilarating. Not just the camaraderie she felt within the crowd’s collective fury, but the thrill of shouting—no, of screaming, until her cheeks ached and her throat was raw—at her mother’s generation-wide wall of silence and complicity as the world erupted in napalm, flame, and corruption.
“Careful, baby! You’re walking too fast!”
Snapping back to the protest at hand, Ava registered Fiete huffing and red-faced a few steps behind her, his banner pole dangling at a precarious angle. Slowing down slightly, Ava let him catch up while briefly fantasizing about doing just the opposite: swiping the plywood pole from his grasp and putting as much distance between herself and him as she could, given the crowd’s density.
She’d met him two weeks earlier outside a Deutsche Bank near Ulrich’s flat, sporting pinstripes and a sandwich-board-style sign: Ask Me What I’m Thinking About. Passersby who complied were offered an improvised pornographic fable on the spot, one that supposedly illustrated “how advanced capitalism fucks us all.” “He’s a fool and a fraud,” Ulrich warned Ava at the time. But Ava was intrigued enough by Fiete’s “bankporn” story in her honor (one involving ice cubes, Spanish fly, and handcuffs) to leave him her number, only to discover that for all his street-side bravado the man was pathologically insecure in the bedroom. It was a disconnect that Ulrich had found riotously funny: “Told you he was a fake,” he’d hooted. “Trust you to bag a performance artist with performance anxiety.”
“You weren’t always so smooth in the sack yourself,” she’d shot back, in an uncharacteristic reference to their own short-lived affair in their teens.
“I was seventeen,” he retorted. “And the least of my problems was getting it up.”
* * *
As Fiete pulled even, Ava threw another quick glance at Bay Lop’s clenched face. It seemed to shiver in some unseen breeze, and Ava found herself shivering too, unexpectedly brushed by apprehension. Shaking the feeling off, she threw her head back and added her own smoke-sore shout to the crowd’s: “Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh!” It felt both furious and playful; a primal nursery rhyme howled in breathless time with a thousand marching footsteps. But as they entered the plaza the mood suddenly shifted. The crowd’s pace quickened into a jog. And as the chant swelled into a full-fledged roar—Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh! Ho! Ho! Ho-Chi-Minh! HO! HO! HO-CHI-MINH!—it was quickly underscored by the sound of sirens in the nearing distance and the rhythmic chop of a helicopter that had materialized above the campus buildings.
And then all of it—the chanting, the marching, the bracing, energizing outrage—was stopping, so suddenly that she nearly ran into the line in front of them.
Confused, Ava stepped back and peered around her banner pole.
“It’s the bulls,” Fiete shouted.
Following his gaze, she made out a dark block of Polizei at the demonstration’s front lines. They were decked out in full riot gear.
“But why are they stopping us?” Shifting her grip again, she lifted onto the tiptoes of her white patent boots. As the chopper bobbed and whined above like an uneasy hornet, she watched as the two sides faced off: cops on one side, students on the other. “Don’t we have permits?”
The attack came in lieu of an answer, though looking back Ava wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the exact moment of its launch. All she’d recall was that one moment the Polizei were in their tight battalions, as stiff and stone-faced as so many tin soldiers. And then they were laying into the demonstration’s front lines with a strangely mechanical-seeming fury that left Ava both stunned and sickened.
“What’s happening?” she cried, to no one in particular, but no one around her seemed to have the answer. And already the neat, forceful rows were unraveling into a panicked scramble to safety. She looked back at Fiete again, uncertain whether to move forward or back before registering that it was too late to do either: the Polizei had already reached them. At the same moment she saw one of the bubble-blowers tumble from her friend’s shoulders, inadvertently falling on top of a policeman who then proceeded to smash her head with his club. Ava gasped as the girl attempted to stagger back to her feet, the blood running in bright, spiked rivulets down the side of her face. As another Polizei pushed past her she extended an arm, mouthing something that might have been help or stop or doctor. Ava turned reflexively to try to offer aid, but the girl had already disappeared from view entirely, replaced by a writhing scrum of dissidence and enforcement.
A moment later the banner shaft jumped in her hands like a fishing pole with a strong bite. Looking over, she saw that her partner had dropped his end and was racing off toward the Tiergarten.
“Where are you going?” she shouted after him.
“I’m splitting,” he shouted back, his blue eyes blank with panic. “You know I can’t afford another arrest.”
And without waiting for her response he sprinted into the crowd, Ava staring after him in mixed disbelief and disgust. Bastard, she thought. Why was Ulrich always right about these things?