by Robert Elmer
Uncle Heinz caught her eye, and his mouth snapped shut. Well, he could pretend not to pray, if he wanted to. She waited for him to nod, or wink encouragement at her, or shed a tear, or do something a person might do at a funeral. But he only held her gaze for a moment longer before turning away and whispering something to Aunt Gertrud. And for the first time, Sabine hurt for her uncle, for what he had become, and for whom he had chosen to follow.
Because when Sabine looked up at the altar of the church, she did not see a figurine of Comrade Ulbricht hanging on that cross.
“ — in Ewigkeit, amen.”
“ — forever and ever, amen.”
17
KAPITEL SIEBZEHN
BURIED ALIVE
“I don’t know how Anton and Albricht dug so far.” Sabine squinted as she hacked out a shovelful of dirt and let it fall behind her. She balanced awkwardly on a box as she reached up, praying she wouldn’t come face-to-face with a coffin.
At least no one had talked about the tunnel. Not yet. If they did, Sabine and Willi would find out in a hurry.
“Just another couple of feet.” Willi’s voice sounded muffled. “We should be near the top.”
After three days of digging, she sure hoped so. Sabine wiped the sweat from her forehead and tried to breathe. But her head spun and her stomach tumbled, almost as if she’d been playing on a playground carousel too long. When she closed her eyes, she saw stars around the edge of her vision instead of their flickering candlelight. And she knew if she didn’t open her eyes soon, she would pass out.
But how long could it take to carve out ten feet of tunnel? At least this part arched nearly straight up, and they didn’t need to keep plugging in wooden braces to keep it from caving in.
Sabine tried not to think of the dirt that covered her face. That got in her mouth and nose and eyes. That matted her hair. She didn’t know if she could keep moving her arms, but she’d long ago stopped crying about it. And she tried to ignore the blisters that covered her hands. It seemed like the ground had changed a bit. More rocks and roots that made it hard to dig.
Never mind all that. She pushed again with the shovel, muscled past a couple of rocks, and widened the tunnel enough for her shoulders plus a couple of inches on each side. No telling who might use this escape, certainly not Uncle Heinz. She wondered what he would think, though, if he ever found out. Maybe he had already and was just waiting for them to come home so he could have them arrested.
“Well, that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?” she asked herself. She could see how coal miners go crazy underground.
“What did you say?” Willi must have crawled in just below her to gather another bucketful of dirt.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “Tunnel diggers always talk to themselves, you know. Keeps them from — ”
She didn’t finish her sentence as she heard movement above her and tried to duck. No! She felt herself fall into a blender of dirt and rocks and roots. She didn’t even have time to scream or to breathe. The tunnel just roared around her like a hurricane, twisting her head and sending her down.
At first it sounded like a dream. Like a ghostly “Say-Beeeee-nuhhhh!” over and over again. Sabine decided she must be dreaming, because she couldn’t move her arms or legs. An awful, familiar feeling. Like waking up in the hospital all those years ago . . . in the starched bed that Nurse Ilse tied her to. In the dark closet that Nurse Ilse locked her in.
This dream had haunted her for years. But she knew that she could trade the dream for a better one. She could fly over the Swiss Alps, over the snow and the meadows, and the reddish-brown cows below would look up at her and moo.
“Please help me get her out of here, Lord!”
But the cows in her dreams had never prayed before. How odd. Someone grabbed her shoulders and bellowed into her face.
“You’ve got to breathe!” Actually, the voice sounded less like a prayer and more like pleading. “Wake up, Sabine!”
Just when she’d begun gliding over the nice, white snow?
But the shaking would not stop. Sabine blinked through a dirty crust to open her eyes. How unpleasant. Then she began to focus: Willi Stumpff, upside down, tears making tracks down his dirty cheeks, staring straight into her face — a lot closer than she would have liked. She tried to back away but couldn’t move her head. And which side was up, really?
“You’re alive!” He still sounded slightly like a cow.
“Haven’t I always been?” She coughed and tried to wiggle her shoulders, then her arms. She blew through her mouth like a horse and tried not to spit dirt in Willi’s face. As some of the dirt loosened, she rolled a little. And ouch, her shoulder felt like a pretzel.
“You must have loosened something up there,” Willi told her. “Are you broken? I mean, is anything broken?”
“Twisted.” She took stock of her body. “But I don’t think broken.” So Willi helped wrestle her out of the dirtslide. When she finally crawled free, something seemed different about the tunnel. They both looked up to find a sliver of light from a smallish hole.
“I meant to do that,” she said with a smile. In her excitement, she didn’t even notice all the dirt she’d swallowed. “Now we have to clear away this dirt and see where we came up.”
But she stopped herself. First she had to tell him.
“I think you saved my life,” she mumbled. “Thanks. But at first, I thought you were a cow in my dream.”
“I thought I was supposed to be a sheep,” he kidded, trying not to think about Sabine trapped in the dirt.
“You’re not a sheep.” She felt her voice catch, a tickle in her throat. “You . . . you dug me out, didn’t you?”
“What else was I supposed to do?” he cracked, not allowing her to get mushy on him. “Now go see what’s going on up there before somebody walks by.”
Sabine could just imagine it: a pastor decides to take a walk near the graveyard, steps into the hole and —
“Come on, Sabine.” Willi pushed her from behind. “Unless you really did break a bone.”
If she had, she couldn’t feel it now. She could feel a trickle of clean air coming through the opening, though, and she pointed her nose right at it. After breathing the damp, dead underground air for so long, it smelled delicious.
But she couldn’t just poke her head up like a mole, could she? Willi pressed something into her hand.
“What’s this?”
“You didn’t think about it?”
She looked down at the small mirror. It looked like the one her mother used to put on makeup. Oh.
“Just hold the mirror up through the hole, and look around,” he told her. “If we tunneled right, you should see the hedge. It should shield us so nobody can see us from the fence.”
So while Willi waited, Sabine raised the mirror, like a submarine periscope. But instead of the hedge —
She pulled her hand right back down, as if she’d been burned.
“Can’t be!” she whispered, and now she worried that someone might hear them. After all their work —
“What’s wrong?”
“We’re not where we thought we were.” She looked like she might cry.
“Close?”
“Not close. We’re in another part of the churchyard, too close to the wall. I don’t know what will happen if we try to climb out right here.”
“But if we don’t?”
“But if we don’t — and soon — someone’s going to find the tunnel for sure.”
18
KAPITEL ACHTZEHN
LAST CHANCE
“Hold it, hold it, hold it.” Sabine pulled up short. “We’ve got to think this through. We’ll only get one chance to do it right.”
Well, they always looked around before they left the ruins of the bombed-out apartment on Bergstrasse. Just to be sure. And that afternoon, she couldn’t see any Vopos, but that really didn’t mean anything.
“Right.” Willi nodded. “So I’m thinking the only way we�
��re going to convince my father is if both my mama and yours tell him they want to go.”
“Maybe.” Sabine tried to think through all the angles. “But I wonder if we should find a few more people and help them escape. After all that work Anton and Albricht did in the tunnel. We hardly did anything, compared.”
“Yeah, but what are we supposed to do, march around the street with a sign: ‘Freedom Tunnel: Open for Everybody’?”
“I just feel guilty, keeping it to ourselves.”
She peeked out at the sidewalk once more, wondering. And even after changing into the clean set of clothes she’d stashed in the Volkswagen, she hoped she didn’t actually look as if she’d just crawled out of a hole. Oh, well. Their first stop: St. Ludwig’s.
“You did what?” Erich swiftly faked a smile and gave Sabine a hug when a dozen people in the hospital cafeteria turned to look.
“I said — ,” she started to explain.
“Little sisters,” he said with his broad smile, but Sabine could almost see the steam coming out of his ears as he cut her off. “Always full of surprises.”
He steered her to a quiet place in the hallway where he faced her and Willi. He looked like a parent who had caught the kids with their hands in the cookie jar.
“Tell me you’re joking,” he hissed, this time not so loud.
“It’s done, Erich.” Sabine crossed her arms and held her ground. She decided they had nothing to apologize for, no matter how mad her big brother sounded. “We finished it.”
Erich’s mouth hung open as he shook his head. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? You could have been buried alive! And who would have known?”
“Ja, Erich,” Willi said. “You should have seen it. Sa — ”
Sabine jabbed him in the side. They didn’t need to tell that story just now.
“It’s done, and we finished it, and that’s all there is to it,” she told her brother. “There’s a little opening by the church.”
Of course she didn’t mention exactly how close to the church or to the wall, because Erich didn’t give her a chance.
“An opening, already?” He rubbed his chin with worry. “That’s not how we planned to do it. We were going to wait until — ”
“We know, we know. It just, well, sort of happened that way.”
No use telling the whole story about the cavein. He already looked like he could have a heart attack any minute.
“Ja, but didn’t you think someone could step right through it? Then we’d have Stasi swarming all over this side of the wall until they found the entrance. Did you even think of that? They’re already breathing down our necks. One of the older nursing supervisors here watches everything I do. I think she helped get everybody arrested.”
“Yes, we thought of it, Erich, and I don’t need you to scold me. We just came for help.”
Erich paced a little circle around them, but he didn’t answer right away.
“And we wanted to ask you if we should tell anybody else in the fellowship,” added Willi.
“Nein.” Erich scratched his head and settled down a little bit. “I haven’t talked to any of them since the Stasi swept through here. It’s way too dangerous.”
“So, what are you saying?” Sabine parked her hands on her hips. “That Willi and I did all that digging for nothing? Look at my hands! You want us to forget everything, because it’s ‘too dangerous’?”
That wasn’t what they’d come to hear.
“Dangerous, yes. Forget everything, no.”
“Excuse me?” Willi whispered out the side of his mouth, but Erich ignored him as he went on.
“Maybe you and Mutti should take this chance to escape. I think she’ll leave now that Oma is . . . gone. She hates what this place is doing to you.”
“Uh, you might want to look down the hall.” Willi tried once more. “Is that the nurse you were talking about?”
The older woman had already started walking briskly toward them, clipboard in hand.
“You there!” the woman called as she approached. “A word with you, bitte.”
“Go now,” Erich commanded. “I’ll take care of this.”
“But — ” Sabine objected.
“Go.” He lowered his voice even more and checked his watch. “I’ll meet you at home in an hour. Not a word to Onkel Heinz or Tante Gertrud. And be careful who sees you.”
“What do you think she wanted?” Willi asked as he checked over his shoulder for the tenth time in the past block. Sabine didn’t want to think about it. But she had a pretty good idea.
“You heard him. Everyone’s being watched.”
“Ja, but why didn’t they arrest him, like everybody else?”
“I’ll tell you why they didn’t.” She sighed. “My onkel. I think he’s trying to use Erich to find the tunnel, so he can get all the credit. Maybe a pat on the back from Comrade Ulbricht.”
“From the Goatee? How do you know that?”
“I don’t, for sure. But I can’t think of any other reason.”
If she’d guessed right, though, the screws would tighten fast. They would have to make their move even sooner. So she kept up her pace for home. Bismarck loped along behind them as if he knew to stay close by. But she paused when they came to Willi’s corner.
“You’re coming,” she told him, without looking up. “Nine o’clock at the Beetle. So we don’t need to say good-bye. Okay?”
“Okay. But listen: you know my father might not . . . well, you know what I mean. So I want you to have something, just in case.”
“Willi, I don’t think — ”
“Just wait here, all right?”
He disappeared into his apartment building before she could answer. In a couple of minutes, he returned with his telescope.
“Here.” He held it out to her. “It’s yours.”
She wasn’t sure how she would carry it. But what was she going to do, say no?
“Well, um, okay. Maybe just a loan. I’ll borrow it until — ”
Until what? They both knew that Willi might not come to the tunnel later. But Sabine wasn’t ready to give up — not yet. She turned away, so Willi couldn’t see her get blubbery, and hurried home. They didn’t have much time.
19
KAPITEL NEUNZEHN
THE CALLING
“You have to go, Mama.” Erich could sound very convincing when he wanted to. “I promise, you’ll never get another chance like this one.”
“How can you promise that?” She sat in a kitchen chair with her arms crossed. “How can you know things won’t open up again?”
“The wall?” He shook his head. “No, Mama. They’re building it stronger every day. Adding more guards. More barbed wire. More no-man’s-land. It’s going to stay for a long, long time.”
“Then why don’t you come with us?” Sabine knew the answer before she asked it, but she hoped. And Erich looked at them with the saddest eyes she’d ever seen. Sad, but with a sparkle all the same.
“Remember how you always told us your place was here with Oma?” He leaned closer to his mother, his hand on her cheek. “You knew that God had called you here, for as long as Oma needed you.”
She nodded as Sabine stood by, helpless.
“I guess I’ve always known God has called me to stay here, for the patients at the hospital.” He turned to Sabine. “I haven’t forgotten what you asked me in the alley, Sabine.”
Neither had she. He didn’t need to explain, but —
“When you asked if I still had a reason to stay in East Berlin. Well, I do. It hasn’t changed. I’m staying.”
Of course that only made their mother cry. Erich tried to dry the tears from her cheeks, tried to tell her not to cry.
“Mutti,” he finally asked her, “don’t you think this is what DeWitt would have wanted you to do for his daughter?”
Their mother gasped at the mention of Sabine’s father, the American airman whose plane had crashed just weeks before Sabine’s birth.
“He would have wanted me to do it a long time ago,” she said as she reached out to take their hands. And with heart-wrenching sobs, she finally nodded.
“Good,” Erich said. “But we’d better move quickly, or no one’s going anywhere.”
Sabine jumped when she heard the front door slam, the way it slammed when Uncle Heinz came in. Instantly they all straightened up and dried their tears.
“When’s dinner?” he asked, poking his head into the kitchen. And his eyebrows rose when he saw them sitting together by the kitchen table. “Or are we just playing cards?”
Sabine’s mother took a deep breath and stood up, though her brother had already returned to the other room.
“I need to tell you something,” she announced. Erich shot up like a rocket.
“No, Mutti. Don’t — ”
But she held up her hand. She had decided, and there was no arguing.
“We’re not just going to disappear without saying a proper good-bye,” she told him, her chin set. “They’re family, even if we don’t always agree.”
“We could write them a note,” Erich suggested quietly. “A fond farewell, or — ”
She shook her head firmly.
“We will tell them face-to-face, and that’s all there is to it.”
Sabine looked at her brother and felt like a leaking balloon, deflating slowly.
Mama has no idea what she’s about to do —
An hour later, Sabine stood still in shock as she watched her mother and uncle hug.
“We’re going to miss you,” said Uncle Heinz. He rubbed his three chins and nodded as if he understood their decision.
Sabine couldn’t believe what she heard. Is this really Onkel Heinz? His face looked almost like it had in the church, when he’d quietly recited the Lord’s Prayer. Just for a moment. Good thing Aunt Gertrud had gone out that evening to visit her sister.
“And we’ll certainly miss you too,” replied Sabine’s mother. She looked as if she meant it. Sabine had packed her toothbrush and a few small things, including Willi’s telescope, in her backpack. They couldn’t drag much with them through the tunnel.
“Don’t get me wrong,” her uncle replied, wagging his finger at them. “I don’t like it, and I don’t approve. And I’ll probably regret this later, but — ”
