by Robert Elmer
“If you continue to raise such a fuss, your mother will never be able to visit again. Never. Do you hear me?”
“I don’t believe you,” Sabine answered defiantly.
Maybe next time Mama will finally take me home again, Sabine thought.
Rheinsbergerstrasse. Home. To Oma’s crowded apartment on Rheinsberger Street in East Berlin. Where she’d lived all her life with her mama and her ancient grandmother, Oma Poldi Becker, and her half brother, Erich. He was twenty years old and wanted to be a doctor. She tried to remember his stories about hiding on an American airplane with his cousin Katarina when he was thirteen. He even said they flew to an American air base with Sabine’s father, who had been an Air Force sergeant. Sabine wasn’t sure she believed it all, but of course it made her jealous of Erich. He had known her American father, while all she had were stories about his sense of humor — and about the plane crash.
If I could go home today, she decided, I’d never complain about Onkel Heinz and Tante Gertrud again. Her uncle and aunt had moved into Oma’s apartment a couple of years ago. It made things a little crowded, but Uncle Heinz had shown her how to tell the difference between a Mercedes and a Volkswagen. She knew she wasn’t supposed to care, because she was a girl, but she did anyway. He could get bossy sometimes, though, and he belched a lot. Especially when he drank beer.
Even Aunt Gertrud’s ranting and smoking wouldn’t seem too bad, if only —
“Out, now!” growled Nurse Ilse, startling Sabine as she unlocked the door. “You have a visitor.”
Sabine blinked at the bright lights but smiled as the nurse carried her back to bed. Wait until she could show Mama —
Her mother stood in the doorway of the hospital room only a few minutes later, her mouth and nose hidden behind a blue hospital mask but her eyes twinkling with tears. She had to wear the mask and a hospital gown just like everybody else, so she wouldn’t catch Sabine’s polio.
“Sabine!” Mama held out her arms as if to hug her only daughter, which of course she could not.
“I’ve been waiting for you all week, Mama.” Sabine couldn’t help grinning from ear to ear. Maybe polio could turn her legs to limp noodles, but it could not keep Mama from her weekly visit. Sabine knew that more than anything. And now it was time for the surprise she and Jesus had been working on for days, in secret, when nobody was looking.
Watch this, Nurse Ilse! Sabine grabbed the corner of her sheet, and a moment later she rolled her left shoulder so her weight would carry her off the edge of the bed.
“No! What do you think you’re doing?” Nurse Ilse fumed as she dropped her clipboard. But Sabine would swing her legs around and show them she wasn’t disabled any longer. See? Just as she’d hoped, her bare feet cleared the edge of her bed and hit the cold, slick tile of the hospital floor.
Now, Jesus! she prayed silently. Please, now! Make my legs strong!
Only maybe she should have prayed out loud. She later decided that must have been what she did wrong. What else could it have been? Not enough faith, she decided. She should have said something out loud, the way Jesus did, like, “Rise, take up thy pallet and walk!” Only Sabine wasn’t sure what a pallet was.
And as both her mother and the nurse lunged for her, Sabine’s knees wiggled for a moment.
Then they buckled and sent her sprawling face-first to the scrubbed tile floor.
She remembered how the yucky smell of floor cleaner made her throat burn and her stomach turn. But she remembered nothing else. When she woke up, she found herself tucked tightly once again into her bed, her prison of sheets. How long had it been? Two minutes? Ten? Her cheekbones throbbed with pain as if someone had slapped her. She knew that feeling. But she did not open her eyes, only lay still and listened to the two women arguing in the hallway.
“You don’t seem to understand how serious this is, Frau Becker. If you don’t leave now, I’m going to have to call security.”
“But that’s my daughter in there.”
“Your daughter will be fine, no thanks to you. Now — ”
“Wait a minute. How was this my fault?”
“If you continue to fill her head with religious nonsense, I’ll have no choice but to file a report. You see what it’s done today. She actually seems to believe what you tell her about” — she spit out the words — “this God healing her legs.”
Sabine didn’t hear her mother’s response. But she was ready to throw her bedpan at the evil nurse. Nurse Ilse went on, threatening to find a more suitable home for Sabine after her hospital treatment — if the “religious nonsense” didn’t stop.
And even polio could not stop Sabine’s tears.
1
KAPITEL EINS
BERLIN, GERMANY
MAY 1961: SIX YEARS LATER . . .
“Not again!”
Sabine groaned when she rounded the corner, adjusting the crutch clamps around her wrists and arms. Up ahead, it looked like construction workers had begun tearing up Brunnenstrasse once more. Maybe this time they wouldn’t stare at her as she limped by on her walking crutches, more like canes that strapped to her forearms. In the past six years, since getting out of the hospital, Sabine had heard all the cruel jokes. So what? She could walk okay, now, even with the brace on her right leg that no one saw. And she couldn’t stay home the rest of her life, just like she couldn’t stay in the hospital. This was 1961, after all.
So she gripped the handles of her crutches a little more tightly, took a deep breath, and stared straight ahead. She would ignore them, just as she always tried to ignore the neighborhood spy, Wolfgang. Did you get a package from the West? Comrade Wolfgang would want to know. A visitor? Wolfgang would report it to the government. Out too late? Wolfgang was always watching. And the people he watched usually received a visit from the Vopo security police, or worse.
Ja, compared to Wolfgang, these construction guys seemed pretty tame. Or she hoped they were. But no spy and no construction workers would keep her from visiting her brother, Erich, at the hospital where he worked. If she had to circle around the block on Bergstrasse, that would probably add half an hour to her walk. Not this time.
To the right, a large older apartment building cast a ragged shadow across the street. The top two stories had collapsed in an American bombing raid during the war, leaving crumbled piles of stone and rusting, twisted steel. That had happened years before Sabine was born, but things didn’t change very quickly in East Berlin. Not like in the western half of the city.
But not to worry. It looked like the construction crew up ahead had taken a break. One of the men sat in the back of his truck, hands clasped behind his neck, eyes closed in a midday nap. The early summer sunshine hit him in the face. Fine. The others had left their pile of water pipes on the sidewalk, blocking the way with a sign that read “CAUTION! NO ENTRY!” in big block letters. But who knew when they would return? Everyone seemed to have cleared out for lunch. A typical hardworking Tuesday in the Soviet sector of East Berlin.
Limping past the warning sign, Sabine glanced down. Flimsy boards covered part of a gaping hole in the sidewalk. An unsteady ladder slanted down about ten feet to an exposed pipe. From top to bottom, they’d laid a canvas tarp out like a slide.
Careful, she cautioned herself as she stepped past the sign. Without warning, a board gave way, launching her right over the edge. Sabine could hardly yelp as she fell; the best she could do was to plant her crutches on the tarp, like a skier sliding down an alpine slope.
But a good deal less graceful. She lost her balance and slid down the slope on the seat of her pants, crutches waving like windmills. The tarp pulled loose, and an avalanche of dirt followed her down, down, down — she slammed into a crumbling brick foundation wall, crutches first. Ouch.
“Ack!” Sabine coughed and struggled to breathe. She’d bent the tip of one crutch, but it was still usable. The brace on her leg had loosened up a bit, but no problem there, either. Had she broken anything? Her arms moved all right, though
she’d twisted her right elbow a bit during the tumble. If that was all she’d injured, she’d been spared.
Thank you. She breathed out the words in a quick prayer and struggled to rise. Had Wolfgang seen her fall? She hoped not. No telling what the workers would do to her if they found her down here. How soon would Erich come looking? He knew the route she would take, but he might just think she’d forgotten about visiting. And he might be too busy to worry about her.
A couple more loose bricks fell with a thunk.
She clutched her head for a moment, trying to decide what to do. She couldn’t climb up the rickety ladder without help. And for certain she didn’t want to meet up with any angry construction workers — not after she’d ignored their warning signs. Maybe she should just see what she’d stumbled onto.
And ja, she could just imagine what her mother would say about that! “Sabine Becker, I thought little girls were supposed to play with dolls, not — ”
Not explore old ruined buildings? Well, that’s what famous explorers did. So why not her? And why not here in Berlin? She couldn’t discover ancient civilizations, but this might be the next best thing. She used her crutch to knock away a couple more bricks, then . . . there! Look at that! She peered into the little cave she found that had just opened up at the bottom of the workers’ dig. More like a basement, actually. Through the dog-sized opening she could make out the dim outline of cement walls and floors, maybe connected to the old apartment building upstairs. She knew that no one had lived in this bombed-out building for years.
She whispered a shy “Guten Tag?” into the darkness and waited for the echo of her hello to return. And she shivered at the draft of stale, musty air that hit her in the face. Hmm. Is this what it’s like to discover a pharaoh’s tomb?
Faint slivers of sunlight streamed down from above, filtered through cracks in the upper floors. Maybe she could find another way out, up through the ruined building’s basement. That way she could escape before anyone found her. Okay, she thought. Here goes.
2
KAPITEL ZWEI
THE BUNKER
For the first few minutes, Sabine felt her way like a blind girl with a cane, taking care not to place her crutches in holes in the floor or cracks in the cement. And as her eyes slowly adjusted to the cellar, she began to realize what this place was, really.
“A bunker,” she whispered to herself. A bomb shelter. Deep cellar. Storage room. Definitely much more than your everyday basement. The ceiling had collapsed here and there, leaving piles of charred timbers like twisted toothpicks. That had opened it up just enough to let in filtered light here and there, through the floor of the ruined building upstairs. But what was all this stuff?
In the first room, she ran her finger along the top of a metal drum, stacked against a wall with a dozen more. It smelled faintly of fuel, maybe gasoline, though when she hit a drum with the end of her crutch, it rang empty.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s been down here since the war.” Her quiet words echoed in the cavelike main room and the others that opened into it. Each was separated by a heavy-duty metal door, almost big enough for a streetcar to drive through. When she pushed on one, it gave way with a loud complaint of rusty metal hinges.
Wow. She picked her way slowly through other shadowy rooms, each one more interesting than the last. In the next room, someone had piled wooden crates full of rusty metal cans clear up to the ceiling. Sabine picked up a can that had been punctured in the bombing raids and held it high to catch a faint ray of sunshine.
Trinkwasser. The emergency drinking water had long ago gone dry. She wondered what it might have tasted like, though, or even if it would still be any good after all these years. But there were more rooms to explore.
In room number three she could make out a small radio receiver on the floor; it had slipped off an overturned table at some point and looked pretty beat up. Sabine tried all the switches. Nothing.
She found the biggest surprise in the last room. She smelled the stale air and sneezed. More stinky fuel? Not exactly. She peered at the shell of a small car, perched on cement blocks, collecting a thick layer of dust.
“Well, there’s not much left of it,” she told no one in particular, “but it looks like an old Volkswagen.”
Uncle Heinz would have been excited to see this. From the looks of it, this had to be a World War 2 Beetle, the kind with a convertible top that folded down. Sort of like the Volkswagen sedan she saw on the streets over in the West, in the American and French sectors of the city. This one was missing the back seat, but it still had the two front seats, a steering wheel, an engine in the back (mostly in pieces), and a windshield (totally cracked). All four of the wheels were missing, though. Well, what did she expect? But the big question was —
“How did they ever get this thing down here?”
She looked around for a big enough opening, but the far wall had crumbled; it ended in a pile of dirt and concrete chunks. Had this been an underground parking garage, as well as a bomb shelter? Maybe. She slipped into the driver’s seat and spun the wheel. Ha! Wouldn’t Erich love this too — driving a twenty-year-old army staff car around Berlin —
But no. Only a few people she knew of owned cars in the Soviet sector. And they only drove noisy, smelly little cars called Trabants — Trabis — made in East Germany. She sighed and bounced on the seat a little. A spring started to pop through.
Oh, well. Maybe she would come back to this place. With a couple of candles and a nice blanket to cover the rotten seats, it could make a perfect reading retreat. A place to get away. If she could just find a way to get in and out of the bunker.
Hmm. That could be a problem. But as she poked around the other rooms a bit more, she wondered why she couldn’t find a ladder. “Or,” she mused as she checked a dark corner, “a stairway!”
There! She looked up at a circular staircase and tested the first step with her crutch. It protested loudly. Okay. Shifting both crutches to her left hand, she did her best to hold her weight up by gripping the railing and taking each step slowly. Up to the second step, then the third —
Minutes later, she pushed up at the boards that covered the only other way out.
“Come on!” she grunted, using the ends of her crutches as hammers to loosen the trapdoor. “Open up!”
Not very ladylike, perhaps, but it worked. After a couple more hits, one of the boards gave a little, even splintering in the corner. She could peek out through the crack into the ground floor of the ruined, empty apartment building above her. She saw a bit of peeling rose wallpaper. Now she knew where she was, sort of. And what to look for. She gave the board another jab for good measure, forgetting where the edge of the steps —
“Au!” All she could do was hang on to the railing as she slid halfway down, fireman-style. Her feet followed behind, hitting every step hard. She eased herself all the way to the floor. Well, she came down a little faster than she went up, didn’t she? In the process, she’d lost a crutch, which had clattered down to the cement floor before her.
Which probably wasn’t a bad thing. By the time she had recovered her lost crutch, she heard a voice echoing through the bunker.
“Suh-BEEE-nuh!” Even from a distance, she could make out Erich’s call. “Sabine! Are you down here?”
“Erich!” she answered back. She squinted as she limped through the bunker and neared the hole in the foundation. “I’m right here!”
“I see that.” Erich still wore his white hospital smock as he peeked inside. “The question is, what in the world are you doing down a hole like this? Bist du verrückt?”
“Nein, I’m not crazy!”
By that time, several construction workers had joined Erich at the top of the hole to see what was going on. Sabine looked down at herself as she thought of how to explain. Good thing she’d been wearing her brother’s hand-me-down pants, the ones her mother never let her wear to church. A dress in this situation would have been a disaster.
“
But,” she finally added, planting a hand on her hip, “I could sure use a hand out of this hole, please.”
Which came swiftly as Erich hurried down the ladder and helped her back up, one step at a time.
“I started to get worried when you didn’t meet me at the hospital at noon,” he told her. “You weren’t back at the apartment, either. Then when I ran by this hole, I saw workers looking down. They said they’d heard a noise. Like something collapsed. That was you?”
“Probably sewer rats,” she told him. “I had to fight off a few.”
Erich just harrumphed; he knew when Sabine was kidding. And Sabine knew Erich had probably been running up and down the streets, searching for her. The athletic twenty-six-year-old hospital intern was always like that. Erich the Rescuer. Erich, always protecting her. She felt like a rag doll as he lifted her back to the street while the workers gathered around to stare.
“Quite a discovery, eh, boys?” Erich said as Sabine held her crutches out to either side like wings. “A perfectly preserved Egyptian mummy. Living down in the sewer for ten thousand years. She can even still talk!”
A couple of the men chuckled as she dusted herself off and pointed to the broken board, the little platform that had dumped her into the hole. “But really, you guys ought to fix that. A person could get hurt. I mean, I was walking just fine before I fell in there. Now look at me. I need crutches.”
See? She could be a comedian too. As long as her older brother was there to cover for her. She smiled at Erich before starting back toward home.
“Thanks for coming after me, though. It was kind of dusty down there. Made me sneeze.”
Erich scratched his sandy hair. “So did you see anything?” His curiosity must have gotten the better of him.
“Oh, you know, the usual Nazi treasure, gold and stuff, hidden for twenty years.”
Which (except for the gold part) was partly true. But Erich wasn’t buying it.
