Chapter 1: Starting All Over Again

Lydia

We had only been apart for little over two months, but it felt as if we had not seen each other for ages, especially as his birthday had been within that time, and I knew that it must have hurt him that his mommy was missing from that most important day of the year for all kids. What must seem like a horrible mother to an outside party was I, Lydia Karrass, a twenty five year old girl, born in February 1960, who had just fled communist East Germany for the freedom of the west. The plan had almost failed before it began, because it meant that I had had to leave my beloved son behind.

Mark was actually an accident and a very early one at that, but he was also the best accident I’ve ever had, because he was the light in my otherwise not exactly easy life.

In the summer of 1973, during a summer holiday at the Baltic sea, thirteen year old, gullible me got it into my juvenile head that I was in love with my teenage summer romance Frank, a cute boy just one year older than I, who was just as green behind the ears as I was. I ended up losing my virginity at age thirteen in the worst sexual encounter two people have ever had. I bled like a stuck pig and he came after just two minutes. I could just a well have reclaimed my virginity on technical grounds. Except for the fact that the clumsiest attempt at sex in the history of mankind had been successful in perpetuating the species.

Frank never got to know that he conceived a son. But he had sure as hell been aware of the possibility. When he realized we hadn’t used any protection, he had just panicked and run away. I don’t know what he had told his parents, but it certainly wasn’t the truth. The next morning his family left and I never heard of him or his family again. Trying to find him was pointless as I didn’t even know his surname and finding the one Frank among sixteen million East Germans would have made playing the lottery look like a safe investment.

Even though being a single teenage mother I wouldn’t face any problems, or so I thought. Social welfare was the one thing that actually worked in East Germany, but my family was the big problem. My parents were both hard-liners, apparatchiks in the worst sense of the word. They disowned me on the spot, even before Mark was born, and most of the family followed their example for fear of political oppression. The only ones who refused to abandon a teenage girl were my grandparents and my younger sister Beatrice.

I would probably have suffered my fair share of censure from the authorities if it wasn’t for the fact that I was one of the country’s top-talents in track and field, more precisely, long distance running. At age twelve I had been spotted by a talent scout and immediately drafted into one of the Kinder- und Jugendsportschulen, which were normal schools, but with sports drills in every waking minute, grooming the talents that would in later years of their career win medals over medals to prove the superiority of of the Communist lifestyle.

Mark was born in March 1974, exactly twenty days after my own fourteenth birthday, and just six weeks later I was back in training. My grandparents took care of him during the day, but I took the one-hour train ride home every day to be with my baby. Grandma Aurelia would often time the feeding in a way that he was hungry just as I came home, so he would get some genuine breast-milk instead of the artificial formula.

Being just fourteen and skinny my boobs had barely started to grow out of my chest and I was not producing enough milk, but it was usually enough for an evening and a night feeding. Often granny would already be waiting for me to storm in and rip my shirt off, so that my upset baby could latch on to his mommy, emptying my tiny tits with an urgency that made a vacuum cleaner look asthmatic.

He grew up to be the light of my life, and from young age he had gotten it into his head that he was the man in the house. Not in the way that he wouldn’t obey me, no. By the time he was eight he would always wait for me at the bus station, insisting on escorting me home and carrying my sports bag. In the evening he would massage my tortured feet while we watched TV. I never had to tell him to do house chores. By the time I came home from training the dishes were cleaned, the trash was taken outside. He was much more independent than your average eight-year-old.

The poor dear was never given any choice about it.

Things deteriorated in 1984. I was supposed to be part of the Olympic team, but most of the eastern bloc states boycotted Los Angeles, including East Germany. I was gutted. On top of that I was put under more and more pressure to get on the state-run ‘medical program’, a euphemism for the extensive doping program in East German sports. At age twenty-four, which is fairly young for a marathon runner, I was good for the occasional top ten finish, but to get this little bit further ahead, I would have to morph into an African or get on the same ‘roids, EPO, hormones and whatever else those Soviets, Americans, West Germans, Chinese and my East German team mates were messing their bodies up with. If you see a female team mate shave her face in the morning, you just know it is nothing you want to take. But the pressure was mounting. I was about to lose all privileges, like getting to travel all over the world, if my results wouldn’t improve. I could have done without the privileges, but that would also have stripped me of any protection from state persecution for my early life choices. I needed to deliver better results, and that wasn’t possible without doping at my young age.

In the end I pretended to cave in. I made a deal with the medical staff. There was an upcoming half-marathon in Stuttgart, West Germany, on March 1st 1985, just eight days before Mark’s birthday. If I did not finish on the podium, I would willingly submit myself to their program. Except, of course, that I had no intention to honor that dirty deal.

Since pensioners were allowed to travel to West Germany, grandpa had visited his brother, who lived in the West German town of Hilden. They traveled to Stuttgart and found out the route of the race. The reconnaissance information he brought back was that we would pass a police station just short of kilometer ten, ideal to flee into and request asylum.

The hardest decision was to leave my beloved son Mark behind. Close family members were not allowed to travel with us. It was East Germany’s cruel way of making sure we would come back. But I had done my homework. During the seventies a treaty had been signed between the two German states that whoever ended up in the other German state, the immediate family had to be released to join them, no matter how that change of position had been achieved. Not even East Germany was cynical enough to go against that treaty in the case of an internationally known athlete.

Knowing that I wouldn’t run more than ten kilometers, I started with the pace normally reserved for 10.000-meters track runs. The Kenyans must have thought I was out of my mind, and didn’t even try to follow my murderous pace – just how I wanted it. Those bastards back home were about to see me flee to West Germany, live on TV and from the lead of the race. Short of kilometer ten I veered sharply left, hopped over the barrier that separated the track and the spectators, and ran into the police station. I had made it.

That’s how I came to miss Mark’s eleventh birthday, taking solace in the fact that my eighteen year old sister Bea would be with him that day, trying her best to stand in for his missing mommy, but my heart still ached, knowing that he had probably spent most of the day crying in Bea’s arms.

And finally the day came – in early June 1985. The political tug-of-war between Germany and Germany had gone on for over two months, but now I was pacing the arrival area at Hamburg Fuhlsbüttel airport like a caged animal, waiting for the flight from West Berlin to arrive.

I died a thousand deaths every time someone exited the gate and it wasn’t my son, but then, finally, I saw him. A flight-attendant held him by the hand as he walked out with his over-sized duffel bag that was way too big for him. The whole world faded out as all I could see was my baby, standing still, his bottom lip quivering in a desperate attempt to be manlier than you can expect from an boy at the age of eleven. I suspect I was doing a pretty good impression of Lot’s wife myself, standing paralyzed with tears running down my face. Finally he dropped the large bag and came running towards me and for what seemed like an eternity the two of us stood in the middle of Hamburg airport, hugging each other desperately while we both cried helplessly until there were no more tears left to shed.

Mark

I had never thought I would ever see the West. Behind the Iron Curtain it had been more myth than reality. Suddenly, when mom sent me to buy groceries, I wouldn’t come back with half the list missing because it was sold out, like was normal in the East. When I went to the shops to buy milk, I knew there would be milk and even several different brands and types to choose from.

Suddenly I could see all the things that I only knew from watching commercials on West German TV, that we had been able to watch in the East as well. Now I could taste all the stuff that had seemed more mythical than real so far. This state of amazement persisted for almost a year, but in the end it wasn’t able to mask that we didn’t really find our footing. The people were different. In a system where everyone had to fend for himself, it simply didn’t happen that neighbors would just invite you over for a barbecue, like it had been custom in the East. No, most of them didn’t speak to us much more than exchanging polite greetings when we encountered each other.

In late 1985 Aunt Bea had been released to the West as well, so I would at least no longer need to be attended to by a nanny, whenever mom was having competitions abroad, but the fact of the matter was, we were even more dependent on each other than ever before, living in our little bubble, just the three of us.

Being the only male in the house, I tried to fill in the role that any boyfriend of mom or Bea would have, if there had been any. I knew mom had dated a few men, but nothing ever came of it, and years later I would find out why. Having had me at only fourteen years, mom had become way more independent than most men appreciated. Many of the guys, especially in West Germany, couldn’t deal with being the man at the side of a successful woman who didn’t agree that her place was in the kitchen. The traditional roles of women as housewives and the man as the provider was still very much alive in West Germany at the time.

Aunt Bea, would never bring a boyfriend home, because she liked women. For her coming to the West had probably been the biggest change as, unbelievable as it sounds, the communist part of Germany had been much more relaxed on the topic of two women or two men loving each other. While homosexuality had been largely decriminalized in East Germany since 1968, West Germany was still stuck in the nineteenth century on the topic.

For me things weren’t exactly easy either. I never was one of the popular kids anyway, often keeping to myself and now in the West I was a curiosity on top of that – the poor kid from the East. People weren’t bullying me. For that too many people knew that we hadn’t exactly fled paradise. But nobody went out of their way to get to know me either, so I spent the last two years of middle school largely without friends, spending my days on the beach drawing and painting.

Our lives were turned upside down yet again in August 1987 when one day I was called to the Principal’s office where I was met by a policeman and a completely panicked Aunt Bea. I think the policeman had to explain it to me three times until my thirteen year old brain could process that he was trying to explain to me that mom was in the hospital, being treated for light injuries she had sustained fending off an abduction attempt with the help of a boxer from her sports club she had happened to walk home with.

Later in the hospital, I think mom was the most collected of us three. Bea was completely beside herself. I was a bit better, but my attempts at being manlier than my thirteen years accounted for, were only partially successful. The thought that the East German secret service Stasi had tried to kidnap my mother to bring her back to the East for punishment for her flight two and a half years earlier had overwhelmed what your average thirteen year old can take when his mommy is threatened.

What that sort of punishment would most likely look like, had been demonstrated by the Stasi in 1983 when they had made an example of Lutz Eigendorf, who like mom, was a high-profile athlete, a soccer player, who had fled to the West. After a failed kidnapping attempt, the Stasi had murdered him in a staged car accident.

That meant we had a good idea what kind of punishment mom was in for and, unsurprisingly, we soon found ourselves being visited by two men, who introduced themselves as an agent of the West German secret service BND and the American counterpart CIA. Back home in the East we had always been indoctrinated that the CIA, or Americans in general for that matter, were the evil incarnate, but somehow the slim middle-aged man with his blond hair and soft-spoken, accented German did not exactly instill fear in me.

Since mom’s safety could not be guaranteed indefinitely in West Germany, we were told that within the next year we would be emigrating to the United States. The Stasi was ruthless, but they weren’t idiots. Going after mom in the States would have been a suicide commando, as not even the Soviets would dare cover their asses in an operation against US citizens.

I would be finishing middle school in a heavily secured government school, while for mom it meant that she had to take a one year break from any competitions. That meant the Seoul Olympics in 1988 would be the second ones she missed out on, due to being caught up in the political wrangling of the cold war.

Lydia

When I was shaken awake on that day in late May 1988, the small government-owned business jet was already on approach to Burbank, where we were scheduled to be met by someone from the German consulate in Los Angeles.

With all the routine of a well-traveled international athlete I had slept through most of the flight, but I felt immediately guilty, when I noticed that in my sleep I had leaned on my son, whose tired features left no doubt that he had been awake all the time. Ever the young gentleman he had not only accepted the additional weight on his shoulder. He had put his arm around me holding me steady for hours. He was smiling at me despite his obvious exhaustion and anxiety. I gave him a little kiss on the nose and he looked the other way in an attempt to hide his blush.

I knew that he liked getting those small pecks from mommy, but at fourteen he was ‘becoming a man’ now, at least in his own mind. As such he could of course never admit to something like relishing a kiss from his mother, so he hid his guilty pleasure behind the fact that the chaste good-night kiss from mommy had always been part of his night-time preparation. He would probably blush a deep shade of crimson if I reminded him of his infantile fantasy at age eight when he was still dead set on marrying me when he was old enough.

But those momentary thoughts of motherly love were soon put back when I remembered what I was putting my baby through. For the second time in his young life he had had to leave everything behind to start from scratch all over again in a country that was as alien to him as outer Mongolia. For me this wouldn’t be the first visit to the States, having run the Boston marathon twice – once for the G.D.R. and once for West Germany. But at least Mark would have the language advantage. We had both been put through a crash-course in English, but he was much better at it than I. No matter how hard I tried, I simply failed to get rid of my German accent.