Zeus

Renate Meurer tells about a bus trip in February '90 -- when the wall was already gone, but the two Germanys were not. In celebration of their twentieth wedding anniversary, the Meurers are in the West for the first time, in Italy for the first time. A bus breakdown outside Assisi drives a fellow passenger, Dieter Schubert, to an act of desperation.
Shared memories and provisions.

It just came at the wrong time. Five days on a bus: Venice, Florence, Assisi. It all sounded like Honolulu to me. I asked Martin and Pit how they even came up with the idea and where exactly the money was coming from and how did they picture us taking an illegal trip for our twentieth anniversary?

I was depending on Ernst not to go along with it. The last few months had been hell for him. We had anything but Italy on our minds. But he didn't say a word. And in the middle of January, he asked if we shouldn't be making some preparations -- we were supposed to leave on February 16, a Friday during school break -- and how were we supposed to get over the Italian border, the Austrian border, with our GDR papers? I figured that at the latest, once I'd told him what the kids had told me -- how we'd be getting West German IDs from a travel agency in Munich, counterfeit most likely -- that'd be that, you could count Ernst Meurer out. But he just asked whether that had been why we'd had the two passport photos taken. "Yes," I said, "the two passport photos, our birth dates, height, and color of eyes -- that's all they need."

It was just like always. We packed clothes in our dark green suitcase, put dishes, cutlery, and food in the black-and-red- checked bag: canned sausages and fish, bread, eggs,...