Life Behind the Wall

by Robert Elmer

  “Yes, I am. The wall’s made me really think about it, and what it means to be free, and I was just wondering if — ”

  “Hold on.” He held up his hand for her to stop. “I don’t think we should be talking about this right now.”

  Sabine had to lean toward him to hear.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because you can get hurt. Just forget it. Don’t even talk about it. There are too many — ” He sighed. “There are too many ways to get in trouble asking those kinds of questions. But listen, when Mutti wakes up, tell her I’ll be home late tonight.”

  “Aren’t you always?”

  He winked at her and hurried off, the big brother, the doctor-to-be, leaving her once again with her fears. She suddenly realized he hadn’t answered her question.

  “Our apartment building is right next to the new wall,” said a voice in the shadows, which made her jump. “You should see it. They woke us up Saturday night, when they started pounding in the street and putting up the posts.”

  “Oh! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry. But we’re in the right place for that, aren’t we?”

  Is that supposed to be funny? Sabine couldn’t see who belonged to the voice, then a boy about her age stepped out of the shadows. He squinted at her from behind an enormous pair of black-rimmed glasses. And then she knew.

  “You’re the kid in the window,” she told him. “I saw you staring at me and my brother the other night.”

  “Me?” He wrinkled his forehead as if trying to remember. “I wasn’t staring.”

  “You were too staring.”

  “Well, then not on purpose.”

  “You were staring accidentally?”

  “My mother’s here, and I visit her a lot,” he told Sabine. “I just look outside sometimes to pass the time.”

  “Oh. And you make big spots on the window with your nose too.”

  “Well, I didn’t see anybody,” he said defensively.

  Sabine hadn’t noticed how thick the boy’s glasses were until he turned away.

  “Wait a minute.” She held up her hand. “Are those glasses . . . I mean, can you — ”

  “See? Hardly. If I take them off, I’m practically blind.”

  “What about with them on?”

  “With them on, I’m practically blind.”

  He chuckled and pointed at her crutches.

  “What about those things? Are you — ”

  “Disabled? You should see me try to walk without them.”

  “Can you?”

  “Not really,” Sabine admitted.

  “Are you a patient here?”

  “Used to be. But I haven’t been back here since I was a little girl. I’m here visiting my grandmother. My name’s Sabine, by the way. Sabine Becker.”

  “And I’m Willi Stumpff. Nice to meet you.”

  “Did you say your mother’s here?”

  “Yep. She had a baby, but it came too early. Mom had a hard time with the baby, and the doctors want to keep an eye on her while she heals. They’re not sure about my little sister, either.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry.” She looked over at Oma again.

  “Ja. Everybody in my family is praying for her, but — ” He chuckled again and looked around, as if somebody might be spying on them.

  “But what?”

  “But you’d better not tell my Junge Pioniere leader. I think he believes Christians are dumb or something.”

  “You’re in the Pioniere, and you’re a Christian? What about all that hip-hooray they do at their meetings, listening to all that Communist ‘for peace and socialism’ stuff?”

  He chuckled again, and the big glasses slid down his nose. “It’s just easier that way. If you knew my parents, you’d know what I mean. I’m not a Communist, though. Just don’t tell anybody, or I might get into trouble.”

  So why is he telling me, a stranger?

  As they talked some more, Sabine decided she liked Willi Stumpff’s openness. She learned that he and his family attended the Lutheran church, which helped explain about the people praying for his mother. And it didn’t take long to figure out that he really couldn’t see much farther than ten feet. That explained why he’d seemed to stare right at her the other night but hadn’t recognized her close up.

  “So you can’t really see what’s going on outside your window?”

  “I can hear things really good. Like — ”

  He paused and pulled her to the side.

  “Like the nurse coming up behind us,” he whispered. “She’s a Communist, and you should stay out of her way.”

  Oh. Sabine didn’t look as the woman in uniform hurried past.

  “I can see shapes okay,” he went on. “My mama sometimes tells me what she sees. Or she did, before the baby came and she had to stay here. She describes things so well, it seems like I can see them too.”

  “So what do you . . . I mean, what does your mother see out your window at home?”

  “Oh, we have a great view of the Spree River, and the new fence runs right below us. You know, the wall they’re starting to build. You can practically touch it.”

  “Wow. I can’t imagine what it would be like to need someone to tell you what’s right outside your own window.”

  “Guess I can’t imagine needing crutches to get around,” Willi responded. So there. Maybe they had a lot more in common than either realized at first.

  “Yeah.” Sabine smiled. “I guess having crutches makes it a little harder to drive.”

  “You mean like a car?” Willi’s eyes widened in surprise. He didn’t know her well enough to know she was joking. But come on, they were only thirteen, right?

  “Army staff car.” She folded her arms and nodded. “Volkswagen. It’s mine.”

  Well, technically, maybe . . . not. Unless you lived by the law of finders-keepers. But she didn’t tell him that part. And his eyes started to look like magnified saucers as she described the underground bunker and “her” car. She neglected to mention some of the minor details, like the missing wheels and the engine that sort of lay in pieces on the ground. Other than that, she could probably drive it right out of there, if she wanted to.

  “Really?” Willi still couldn’t believe it. “This I have to see.”

  She thought for a moment. Could she really trust this boy? Then again, he’d trusted her from the start.

  “Maybe — ” She hesitated. “But on one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “That you don’t tell anybody.”

  He nodded. “No problem.”

  “And then,” she added, “you have to let me see what the city looks like from your window.”

  7

  KAPITEL SIEBEN

  THE VIEW FROM WILLI’S PLACE

  The following afternoon, Sabine stood in Willi Stumpff’s fifth-floor apartment, staring out the window at the divided city and the Spree River.

  “What a great view. I’ve never seen a better one. And it looks totally different up here,” she told him, “compared to down on the street. The East and West sides of Berlin look like different worlds from up here!”

  Willi nodded as if he agreed, though she wasn’t sure. He couldn’t see the new buildings and shops on the other side of the fence and the bombed-out buildings on their side. Could he? The bright signs and lights on the other side, the gray on their side. It was almost as if the war had never ended in half of the city.

  And they were in the wrong half.

  “I used to play in that park.” She pointed at the green acres of Tiergarten, now forbidden territory, just across the river. And again she almost forgot that Willi couldn’t see what she did.

  “You mean Tiergarten? Me too.” He nodded, running a finger across the worn velvet of a rich red drape. She’d never seen him at the park. Maybe rich kids like him went to different schools.

  “What does your father do?” she asked Willi. “I didn’t see him at the hospital.”

  “
Oh.” His face fell. “Well, yeah, I don’t see him much, either. He used to work for the government. Now he works on cars.”

  Nothing wrong with that. But the way Willi said it made her feel as if it were, well, embarrassing. Willi’s father paced in the next room, talking on the telephone in hushed tones. Sabine wished she hadn’t asked.

  But Willi seemed to shrug it off. He pressed his nose to the window as he had at the hospital. Without taking his eyes from the view, he asked her to describe everything she could see.

  “Everything?” She wondered whether she’d get home for dinner in time. When he nodded, she started by telling him about the people walking through the park and the people riding bicycles along their side of the border. She told him about the little shops on both sides of the fence, about the church and the graveyard. She described the soldiers patrolling with guns and the men laying a brick wall next to the barbed-wire fence.

  “And look there!” She waved one arm wildly while balancing her crutches with the other.

  “What are you doing?” Willi grabbed her wrist and tried to pull her away from the window. “Someone’s going to see you!”

  “That’s the point!” She wrestled her arm free. “I see a couple of American soldiers, over on the other side of the fence . . . Yoo-hoo! Over here!”

  Willi held his head in his hands and looked alarmed. But never mind him. And never mind that his father would probably hear her. She continued to wave as wildly as she could, hoping to catch the Americans’ attention.

  “There, see? They’re stopping!” She waved again, just in case one of the soldiers happened to look up. She prayed the American soldiers could do something about their prison city. Her brother had told her stories about when he was her age, when the American planes flew into the city, bringing food and coal, even candy for the kids.

  But that was a long time ago, and these were not the same soldiers. They wore the same uniforms, though, with the same pretty red, white, and blue flag on their jeep. Come on, look up!

  But a moment later, she let her hand fall.

  “What happened? Did they see you?” Willi still hid behind his hands. “Do they have guns? Are they looking up here?”

  “Willi, they’re Americans, not the Stasi.” Not the feared secret state police. She watched, disappointed, as they started their jeep. “Aww. There they go. They just stopped to talk to somebody down there.”

  She watched the Americans until they had driven out of sight, up their side of Bernauerstrasse.

  “See anything else?” Willi finally asked after she’d stayed quiet for a few minutes.

  Ja, she did. She continued telling him about the people outside the window: A couple trying to maneuver a baby carriage over a curb. A serious-looking man in a dark gray coat (even in the summer heat!) . . . probably a secret agent. That’s what secret agents wore. She even told Willi about the couple strolling close to the fence, and —

  “Wait a minute. He’s walking right toward the fence.” What was he doing?

  “What? Do you mean he’s trying to — ”

  “I think so.” She nodded. She didn’t even need to say the word escape. They both knew.

  “What about the woman? You said they were a couple.”

  “She’s grabbing his arm, like she doesn’t want him to go.”

  “But he’s going anyway?”

  Sabine lowered her voice, hoping Willi might do the same. She didn’t want Herr Stumpff to come investigate.

  “He just shook her off. Now he’s trying to climb over the barbed wire.”

  “What about the guards?”

  “One of them is — ” The words just wouldn’t come. They’d all heard World War 2 stories about the Nazis, the Blackshirts, the Brownshirts, the villains, the men who blindly followed Hitler. Now here in the People’s German Democratic Republic, Soviet-controlled East Germany, they had Vopos. The men who knocked on doors in the middle of the night, who kept people from escaping to freedom in the West. The men now pointing their guns at the man trying to scale the fence.

  “Are you sure he’s trying to escape?” Willi leaned against the window as if he could see for himself. “It’s not even night yet. He must be crazy.”

  Sabine nodded but could not take her eyes off the scene below.

  “Come on, Sabine. You have to tell me.”

  But Sabine’s throat had gone dry, and she could barely speak. “He, he’s . . . climbing, now. The woman is on her knees on the sidewalk. I think she’s crying. Motioning to him. Telling him to stop, probably.”

  “And?”

  “Another guard just ran over.”

  “He’s got a gun?”

  Sabine nodded.

  “Sabine?”

  “Yeah. He’s . . . pointing his gun. He’s — ”

  She winced. A muffled pop-pop, like fireworks from a distance, reached them. Seconds, maybe a minute ticked by before Willi spoke again.

  “Do you think he’s alive?” he wondered quietly.

  “There’s an ambulance down there. They’re carrying him off.” Did he move? Maybe. “I think maybe he is. It looked like he moved his arm. I think.”

  Or she prayed that he did. Suddenly she hated the wall that now divided their city: allowing free people on one side, trapping people on the other. The free could travel and laugh and buy things in the West; the trapped faced dreary gray cement apartment buildings and limited supplies in the East. No wonder the man had risked his life.

  Sabine’s shocked tears had begun to dry, and she gripped her crutches until her hands turned white. Wasn’t this the kind of thing Corrie ten Boom and Anne Frank had lived through? She’d read books about both of them — books that weren’t likely on the “approved” list. Maybe World War 2 hadn’t really ended sixteen years earlier, in 1945. Maybe she had just seen it begin again, right outside Willi Stumpff’s fifth-floor window.

  Sabine couldn’t watch anymore. She wanted to throw up. And she hadn’t realized it before, but she’d bitten her lip so hard that now she could taste the blood.

  “I have to go,” she finally told Willi. He didn’t ask about seeing her car. Good. Some other time, maybe.

  “See you at St. Ludwig’s tomorrow?” he asked. He looked as shaken as she felt.

  She nodded.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  8

  KAPITEL ACHT

  THE IDEA

  “I’ve been thinking, Willi.” Sabine leaned against the wall, near the empty nurses’ station.

  “That’s scary.”

  “No, really. I think I know how the last war happened.”

  “Let’s hear it for the world-famous Sabine.” He raised his voice like a circus announcer. “The girl who’s unlocked the key to world peace.”

  “You’re making jokes. I’m serious.” She checked to make sure no one was listening.

  “Oh, you want a good joke? How about this one: When does a Trabi reach top speed?”

  “Willi, I don’t think — ”

  “Come on; it’s just a car joke. When does it go the fastest?”

  She sighed. “I give up.”

  “When it’s being towed away.”

  He cackled as if his joke about the clunky East German car were the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but he stopped when he saw Sabine’s halfhearted grin.

  “Sorry. You were telling me about world peace. Go ahead.”

  “Listen — ” Sabine held up her finger like an Einstein who had just come up with the Big Answer, maybe a cure for cancer. “It wasn’t that there weren’t enough good people. The problem was that they were all too afraid to speak up.”

  “That’s it?” Willi raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Right.” She nodded. “And the same thing’s happening today. Everybody’s too scared to say anything about the wall. But if we all worked together, we could stop it.”

  “We could, huh? How?”

  She scratched her head.

  “I haven’t figured that part out yet. But I do know how
we can bring people together. Right now they’re just standing around watching the wall go up, acting like a bunch of sheep.”

  “Baa.”

  “Would you quit it?” She punched him on the shoulder. “Do you want to stop the wall, or don’t you?”

  “You know I don’t like it any more than you do.” He sighed. “We used to visit my cousins in the American sector and my grandparents. Everybody’s over there, and we’re stuck over here for the rest of our lives.”

  Sabine told him her plan, but he didn’t seem convinced.

  “What if somebody finds out?” he asked. “Do you know how much trouble we’d be in?”

  “First of all, nobody’s ever going to find it down in the bunker. And second of all, if Anne Frank could do it, so can we!”

  “Who’s Anne Frank? Somebody you know?”

  “You’re kidding me. You didn’t read that book?”

  He shrugged. And for a moment, she wondered if boys had half a brain.

  “It’s this diary, see, and — ”

  “I’m not into girls’ diaries. Boys write journals.”

  “Would you stop? I’m trying to explain. Anne Frank was Jewish, and she had to hide in someone’s attic the whole war, and she was really brave, and she wrote a diary, which they turned into a book. Got it now?”

  “Got it. So we write a journal.”

  “No. I’m just saying she was brave, even when people were out to get her.”

  “Oh.” Willi scratched his head. “Okay.”

  “So tomorrow night we meet in the bunker, and we don’t tell anybody else.”

  He raised his right hand. “On my honor as a Junge Pioniere.”

  “Ohhh.” She rolled her eyes. “Anything but that.”

  “Scout’s honor, then.”

  “You’re not a Scout. How do you know what they do?”

  “They have them in England. And America. They go camping. I read it somewhere.”

  “I thought you didn’t read.”

  “I do too. Just not girls’ diaries.”

  “All right. But forget the Pioneer honor.” She held out her hand for him to shake. “We have to make a pact.”

  “Sounds serious.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. “What kind of pact?”

  “To do whatever we can, for as long as we can. For freedom.”