Lessons

by Ian McEwan

At last he gave up and moved on. Soon he was walking by the Wall, along Niederkirchner Straße. In white paint a graffito read, Sie kamen, sie sahen, sie haben ein bisschen eingekauft—they came, they saw, they did a little shopping. In historical Berlin, Caesar would certainly be remembered. Roland slowed by the remnants of the demolished Gestapo headquarters. There was nothing left above ground. He stopped to look down. A row of white-tiled basement cells glinted in the semi-dark. Here, Jews, communists, social democrats, homosexuals, countless others spent their final moments in agony and terror. The past, the modern past, was a weight, a burden of piled rubble, forgotten grief. But the weight on him was at one remove. It barely weighed at all. The accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell—a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife—was by comparison a luxury suite. If his life so far was a failure, as he often thought, it was in the face of history’s largesse.