The Regret Of A Gaze
It was the final time he would sit on his bench by the Big Pond. A stone’s throw from the Peace Bell.
It was not that he particularly liked the spot anymore, it was more out of habit. It was true he had a nice vantage point for people watching.
He came most days. Usually at eleven. It was not far from his apartment. He had done so for the thirty years since his wife’s death. She hadn’t been so old, but neither so young. He had outlived everyone, the centenary was nearing, a year to go if he remembered correctly. He didn’t look it, closer to seventy-five. That is what he was told.
That was not to say, that he did not feel it. Life had not been easy on him. Spared the firing range by a stroke of luck and a childhood, marked by the pressures of poverty.
At the Big Pond, he could forget that. He would watch the people. It was more interesting these days. The teenage tourists speaking loudly in a mishmash of English and Spanish. Children of every race running about. The gay couple holding hands. He wondered what his deceased peers would have thought of such sights.
They were communists too, but he knew that most carried the lessons of intolerances from the old regime. He had once possessed them too. He had mellowed. His ideological roughness had diminished into a shadow of its former self.
It made life easier. It was not that he felt his life work had meant nothing. Many around him, would tell him to be ashamed of it. Stasi. He had heard strangers say it with such disgust, that it would send a wave of shivers through his body. They never understood the nobleness of their mission. The creation of a true socialist state. He sighed. In his heart, he knew that many things done in its name were wrong.
He smiled to himself; a little girl ran along with a green balloon. He carried the pride of resistance. He had stood against Nazism. He didn’t have to. He could have joined the parade. He paid, the lashings of fascism breaking upon him. The people didn’t know that now. Nor did they care.
They wrongdoings of Nazism and the Socialist experiment of their little Republic were equal, he was told. No, they would never be. Not in his eyes. He had found love in its birth. Hanni. She had curly brown hair, ruddy blue eyes and a dangerous wit. She devoted herself to teaching the new generation. She had cut herself from her unmentionable family, and adopted the Red Flag.
Martin. His boy arrived on the Earth, as the tanks rolled down shooting the workers. He sighed. He had stubbornly believed in the action. The forces of imperialism were out to subvert the people’s will, he was told. Martin grew up with the worker’s will. He was too free-willed for the walls of their little Republic. In the end, he was banished from the paradise.
The old man had seen his son twice since its demise. Martin did not want a relationship. He had built his own life in the West. Bourgeois, at least in his Father’s mind. Resentment for his fellow citizen.
He looks across the park for a final time, a group of rollerbladers pass. He feels sorry for his son. He will never find balance, he realises. Never see what is important. A tear rolls downs the old man’s cheek. He is so happy. He got to see freedom. He saw the contradictions of humanity.
And most of all, he learnt to love and forgot the ability to hate.
