Cutout

One Berlin, 12:03 P.M. She was a small woman; the press had always made much of that. On this crisp November morning in the last days of a bloody century, she stood tiptoe on a platform designed to lift her within sight of the crowd. They were a polyglot mass -- threadbare German students, Central Europeans, a smattering of American tourists. Turbaned Turks holding bloodred placards were shadowed, of course, by the ubiquitous security detail of the new regime. After twenty-four hours in Berlin, Sophie Payne had grown accustomed to the presence of riot police. The international press corps jostled her audience freely, cameras held high like religious icons. The new German chancellor had not yet banned the media. Just across Pariser Platz, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, sat a tangle of television vans and satellite dishes. Sophie surveyed them from her podium and understood that she was making history. The first American vice president to descend upon the new German capital of Berlin, she had appeared at a troubled time. The people gathered in the square expected her to deliver an American message -- the promise of solidarity in struggle. Or perhaps redemption? She had come to Berlin at the request of her president, Jack Bigelow, to inaugurate a foothold in the capital. Behind her, to the rear of the seats held down by the German foreign minister and the U.S. ambassador, the new embassy rose like an operatic set. Before it, Sophie Payne might have been a marionette, Judy playing without Punch, an official government doll. The U.S. embassy's design had been fiercely debated for years. The trick, it seemed, was to avoid all visual reference to Berlin's twentieth century -- that unfortunate period of persistent guilt and klaxons in the night. Comparison with the present regime might prove unfortunate. But neither was the nineteenth century entirely acceptable; that had produced Bismarck, after all, and the march toward German militarism. The State Department planners had settled at last on a postmodernist compromise: a smooth, three-storied expanse of limestone corniced like a Chippendale highboy. It might, Sophie thought, have been a corporate headquarters. It made no statement of any kind. That was probably her job today, too. But in the last thirty-six hours she had read the obscene graffiti scrawled on the new Holocaust memorial. She had met with third-generation Turkish "guest workers" -- gastarbeiters -- about to be repatriated to a country they had never seen. She had even dined with the new chancellor, Fritz Voekl, and applauded politely when he spoke of the rebirth of German greatness. Then she had lain sleepless far into the night, remembering her parents. And decided that a statement must be made. Now she set aside her carefully crafted speech and adjusted the mike. "Meine Damen und Herren." In the pause that followed her amplified words, Sophie distinctly heard a child wailing. She drew breath and gripped the podium. "We come here today to celebrate a new capital for a new century," she said. That was innocuous enough; it might have been drawn from the sanitized pages she had just discarded. "We celebrate, too, the dedication and sacrifice of generations of men and women, on both sides of the Atlantic, who committed their lives to the defeat of Communism." Nothing to argue with there -- nothing that might excite the black-clad police or their waiting truncheons. "But the fact that we do so today in the city of Berlin is worthy of particular attention," she continued. "The capital of Germany's past as well as her future, Berlin can never be wholly reborn. It carries its history in every stone of its streets. For Berlin witnessed Hitler's tyranny and horror, and Berlin paid for its sins in blood. As we dedicate this embassy, let us commit ourselves to oneMathews, Francine is the author of 'Cutout' with ISBN 9780553108934 and ISBN 055310893X.