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Europe > Germany > Berlin > Berlin > Articles > If Pigs Could Fly

If Pigs Could Fly

by Rory MacLean

In 1989 I began to write a sensible book on eastern Europe. Then a revolution tore down the Berlin Wall. Fifty years of totalitarianism -first under fascism and then communism - ended almost overnight

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Winston the pig fell into Zita's life when he dropped onto my uncle's head and killed him dead. The news reached me in Rostock, drab, damp and winter grey, where my trip had begun. I had planned to travel from the Baltic to the Black Sea, across the continent's waist, along the line of the old Iron Curtain, but a telephone call changed everything.

"It's your uncle," she shouted. The line was bad. I couldn't hear. "He's finally kicked buckets."

My aunt had learnt her English after the war, while the allies remained allied, from the British military attaché in Budapest. It hadn't improved with age.

I caught the train to Berlin and changed for Potsdam. The lost corner of the west had regained its central position and Europe had reclaimed its east. The Wall, which had been open for only a few weeks, was breached in places, like a sand bank by the current, and rivers of people streamed across the false divide. They gathered in pools on no man's land, lapped against the barrier and wore it away with hammers then pocketed the detritus as mementoes. The late great division of the world, between a capitalist west and a communist east, passed away as an historical aberration. Where then, if no longer down this line, was the real end of Europe?