Adele Ferguson

I HAVE TO ADMIT that my piece of the Berlin Wall doesn’t exactly reek with authenticity.

Not like my piece of the original London Bridge. I bought that piece years ago when the bridge was sold to somebody in Arizona, torn down and reconstructed over a river there. My piece is about 2-by-3-by-5 inches and is gray and white granite with a hole in the top for matches since it has a little plaque on the end that reads “The Original Cigarette Lighter.” There’s another plaque on it that reads “Authentic piece of the London Bridge, Harold K. King, city engineer, Corporation of London.”

I forget what I paid for it when I bought it out of a magazine, but $10 or so, I think. My husband said Harold K. King was a con man who made a fortune whacking up old tombstones into pieces and selling them to gullible people like me. There wouldn’t be enough left to put the bridge back up by the time they got through selling pieces of it out of a magazine, he said.

There were bound to be some pieces they didn’t need, I said. Your old Oldsmobile still was drivable after you worked on it all that time and had two or three buckets of bolts and things left over after you put it back together.

Those were just superfluous bolts that never should have been in the car in the first place, he said, and probably the reason all cars cost too much. Unnecessary bolts.

ANYWAY, they just got through in Berlin commemorating the construction of the Berlin Wall 50 years ago on Aug. 13, 1951, and I happen to have a piece of it salvaged when it was torn down in 1989.

I was walking through a secondhand store here when I spotted hanging on the wall a big plastic envelope. “Berline Zerfikat” it said in big letters on the paper inside, flanked by a silhouette on one side of two bears either dancing or shaking hands and on the other by a bear within a crown, presumably the emblem of the city of Berlin.

“This is an original stone from the BERLIN WALL,” was stenciled in the middle. Next to that message was a picture of a man in a brown coat and gray pants standing in front of a wall on which there is a lot of paint, some of it blue. Inside the envelope was a chunk of concrete with pebbles embedded in it that was about the size of a large plum and had blue paint on one side.

Naturally, I had to have it to go with my piece of the London Bridge and my piece of brick from the Rome Coliseum and my rock from Bryce Canyon and my marble from China, so I paid $15 for it.

What, my husband asked, makes you think this really is a piece of the Berlin Wall? Anybody can put blue paint on concrete rubble, he said, and this guy in the picture looks like somebody I knew that wanted to sell me a copper still he’d made in the Navy yard.

YOU HAVE TO TRUST something, I said, and lucky for you, you could never figure out how to put the still together or you’d be in jail today. I’ll figure it out sometime: he said, but at least it would be useful which is more than I can say for your piece of the Berlin Wall.

It’s a conversation piece, I said. Besides, I think the man in the picture looks like Erich Honecker who as secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity party was in charge of the building of the Berlin Wall. He later became leader of East Germany until he aggravated Gorbachev by refusing to join Gorbachev’s call for glashnost (thank you, computer). It was about that time, I suspect, he decided on a second career sacking up pieces of his wall for garage sales. I always wondered how much of the wall he kept for himself.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)