The Bell Curve:

I once owned a piece of the Berlin Wall, chipped out with my own rented hammer.

For a while, I had it stashed with some other travel mementos, but it has long since been lost.

It wasn’t much anyway; just a small piece of concrete without distinction, except for one thing: the memories it carried.

I’ve been reminded of them all this past week because of the attention being paid to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall of Berlin. Seems like everybody has a Wall story.

Well, my wife and I were there. And I think I can make a pretty good case that we were the passengers in the first post-Wall cab run from East to West Berlin. And therein lies our story.

This was November 1989, and we had been visiting friends in southern France.

A year earlier, I had covered a movie being shot in Budapest that greatly fueled my curiosity about the ferment then going on in Eastern Europe, as communist regimes were being overthrown and new governments opened doors long shut and barricaded.

We didn’t know how close that was to happening in Germany when we decided to see for ourselves.

So our first stop out of France was Berlin, an island of West Germany in an Eastern sea, where visas were still required for visitors.

Our train tickets and the little map I carried showed two railway station stops in West Berlin.

We wanted off at the second, so I unloaded our luggage, and we were waiting at an oddly deserted platform door as we pulled into the second station. Already uneasy, my stomach started churning when I saw that the name of the station didn’t match the name on my map. Since there was no one to ask before the train pulled out, we decided to get off, figuring we could take a cab to our hotel from wherever we were, while we might end up in Poland if we stayed on the train.

The station was spacious and sparse and everyone I asked for help seemed in a hurry. I drew blanks until a young man who happily spoke English spotted our confusion and asked if he could help. He told us we were in East Berlin and our hotel was in the West. And that we would need to show our visas because the people running East Berlin hadn’t yet opened it up.

We had decided not to bother getting visas since East Germany was the only place on our schedule we needed them. So the stomach churning started again. The prospect of talking our way out of there with Communist bureaucrats was deeply depressing.

It was at this low point that Sherry waved at a line of empty cabs and said, “Why don’t we at least try the easy way first?”

There must have been a dozen cabs lined up at a station exit, with nary a passenger in sight. Twelve drivers smoking and schmoozing and hanging out. And we hit them all. I had an ad for our hotel, and I would show it to each driver. He would take a cursory look, then shake his head and we would move on. We went through the whole dozen with the same result. Nothing. So we ended up hopelessly at the end of the line trying to decide what to do next. We were in that state when one of the cabs pulled out of line and stopped in front of us. Wonder of wonders, he spoke English, a skill he hadn’t exposed on the first round.

Pointing at my hotel ad, he said: “Do you understand that we can’t go there? Can’t even try.” He stopped and let that sink in, then asked if we had “papers.” When we didn’t, he thought our plight over, then came to a decision.

“I’ll take you to Brandenburg Gate,” he said. “That’s as far as I can go. But maybe someone there can tell you what to do.”

It didn’t sound very hopeful, but it was all we had. So in a kind of tense silence, we got our first look at Berlin from the wrong side of the Wall. As we approached Brandenburg Gate in bright, early morning sunlight our driver slowed to a crawl, looking right and left in growing astonishment. No one stopped him. No one was there. The sentry boxes were empty.

Two blocks into West Berlin, he pulled to the curb, checked to be sure he wasn’t being followed, saw no one showing the slightest interest in him. Then he turned to us and said: “I’ve never been here before. I’ll have to get directions to your hotel.”

When we arrived there, he got out of his cab with us, and we stood in the middle of a busy street, shaking hands and canonizing the moment. Then he went off to explore his newfound freedom. Only later did I realize I had never heard his name.

By the end of that day people were pouring across the East-West lines in both directions, and we were chipping our piece of the wall, then having dinner in a magnificent East German restaurant that was deserted because the influx of West German money had instantly raised prices beyond the reach of most Easterners who were sitting at home anyway watching a German soccer team World Cup match. So instant normalcy had set in. And we could claim a tiny role in it.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.