Life Behind the Wall

by Robert Elmer

  Again the pounding, even louder.

  “Just a minute, bitte.” Erich took his time pulling back the deadbolt. The Vopos had to know whose door they were pounding on. Herr Doktor Erich Becker, one of the few intellectuals who had neither joined the Communist party nor escaped to the West. Didn’t that mean anything to them, when so many other surgeons and engineers and scientists had already jumped ship? Anybody with a brain, really. And that clearly didn’t include these police, still pounding on the door.

  “Oh, it’s you, Hans!” Erich opened the door and an out-of-breath man about the doctor’s age tumbled in. Not a guard, after all. “Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “Sorry.” Hans, the taller man, brushed himself off and nodded his hello at the others as Erich closed the door. “Your neighbor lady was listening to every word, so — ”

  Frau Nosey! Erich seemed to understand as they continued their conversation in whispers.

  “Come on, Liesl.” Frau Stumpff rose to her feet. “Let’s go see what your uncle has cooking.”

  Liesl followed but couldn’t help peeking at the strange visitor. She could see everything from the safety of her uncle’s small eat-in kitchen. The two men had bowed their heads and seemed to be praying.

  “You’re just as bad as the woman down the hall,” Liesl’s mother said as she pulled her daughter away from the doorway and handed her a paring knife. “Here. You can help me peel these potatoes.”

  Peel? More like rescue. Some of the spuds were already sprouting, and maybe it would be a better idea to plant them in a garden. But here in East Berlin —

  “Just cut out the parts that are still good,” her mother instructed.

  Liesl sighed as she worked at the kitchen sink and filled a paper sack with peels and bits of potato they couldn’t eat.

  “Potatoes, always potatoes,” she whispered as her mother busied herself gathering plates to set the table. “I hate potatoes.”

  “So do I.” Her uncle slipped up from behind and grabbed one out of her hand. “And here you are on your birthday, doing all the work.”

  “Oh!” Liesl dropped her knife in the sink, splashing potato water all over them. She had to giggle. “I didn’t hear you. Who was that?”

  “Oh. Hans? Just a guy from church.” He started juggling a couple of the potatoes. Onkel Erich, the circus clown. “He and his wife are going through some, uh, tough times.”

  And so he came to a bachelor for help? Liesl knew her uncle was different that way, that everybody liked him. Even so —

  “I gave them one of your little Bibles. See? Already your smuggling comes to good.” He clamped a hand on his mouth and lowered his voice. “Don’t tell your mother I said so.”

  Her mother had gone in the other room to look for a tablecloth. Liesl smiled and shook her head. She started to answer but her uncle cut her off.

  “But she’s right, you know. It’s very dangerous, what you were doing.”

  “But you said — ”

  “I know what I said. Of course, if you were to take a book back the other direction, that would be a different thing.”

  Liesl looked at him in confusion.

  “See that Bible up there?” He pointed to a shelf piled to the ceiling with papers, magazines, and books. “It belonged to your great-grandmother, your Uhr-Oma Poldi Becker. She gave it to me before she died, and I’ve just kept it, like some kind of memorial. Since I prefer my smaller Bible, I’ve never used hers. I think you should have it to remember her by, especially since it’s your birthday.”

  Liesl stared at the book. “I don’t know much about Uhr-Oma Poldi. I’d love to have her Bible. Thank you!”

  “Then get it down for me, if you would, please.”

  The medium-sized Bible, caked in a thick layer of dust, rested on a pile of papers. Liesl could barely read the old-fashioned gold lettering — Die Heilige Bibel — on the cracked black spine. Her great-grandmother’s? Really? She’d never seen anything that had belonged to Uhr-Oma Poldi. She pulled a chair over and quickly climbed up to reach the book.

  “Liesl,” her uncle warned her, “be careful, that chair’s a bit wobbly — ”

  Too late. Liesl grabbed for the shelf as she teetered, but only managed to grab a fistful of papers. The papers brought with them a pile of books, which knocked over a stack of newspapers, which brought down nearly everything else on the shelf.

  Including Der Heilige Bibel.

  “Oh, dear!” Liesl tried to catch some of the paper avalanche, but she only came up with a handful of brittle newspaper

  clippings as they snowflaked through the air. The Bible crashed to the linoleum floor with a resounding thunk!

  “I am so clumsy,” Liesl moaned as she jumped off the chair and tried to gather the mess.

  “Are you two okay in there?” her mother called from the other room. Erich told her they were fine and hurried over to help Liesl pick up.

  “I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating.

  “Don’t worry about it. That shelf needed a good cleaning,” he laughed.

  As Liesl handed the clippings to her uncle, she couldn’t help noticing the photo of a little boy standing beside an American soldier. One of the “Candy Bombers,” the headlines called him. During the Berlin Airlift, she read, the soldier had helped to drop handkerchief parachutes weighted with candy over the city for hungry kids. It had helped to raise people’s spirits during the tough times.

  Neat story. But something about the crooked smile on the little boy’s face told her —

  “That’s you, isn’t it?” She knew the answer as he quietly took the clipping from her and replaced it carefully in a photo album. Liesl’s mother limped into the room as he did so and froze when she saw the album in his hand.

  “I was just going to show her Oma Poldi’s Bible,” he told his half-sister. “The one she gave me. In fact, I thought perhaps Liesl should have it.”

  Liesl’s mother didn’t answer.

  “Listen, Sabine, it was just an accident.” Erich quickly returned the album to the shelf. But a chill had already fallen over the room, and Liesl’s mother handed Liesl a tablecloth without a word.

  “She has a right to know what happened, don’t you think?” Erich asked. But Liesl’s mother simply walked over to the little gas stove and busied herself frying some onions. He went on, “She’s thirteen, for goodness’ sake. Why is it still such a deep, dark secret? It’s ancient history! If you don’t tell her about him — ”

  Him? Liesl felt confused. Weren’t we talking about Uhr-Oma Poldi? she wondered.

  “If I don’t, you will?” Frau Stumpff turned on her half brother with tears in her eyes, and Liesl didn’t think the onions had caused them. “No.”

  “Mutti?” Liesl’s mind raced as she looked from her mother to her uncle and back again. Could they be talking about her grandfather, the American soldier who had died before her mother was born? The one her mother would never talk about.

  What didn’t Liesl know?

  4

  KAPITEL VIER

  FOR FRED

  Nick clutched his backpack under his arm and looked up at the shop sign, then down at his How to Speak German in Thirty Days phrasebook to be sure.

  S-i-l-b-e-r-s-c-h-m-i-e-d?

  But “silberschmied” wasn’t in the list. Seemed like everything else was, but not this.

  “Forget it.” The little sign, besides the terribly long German word, had a picture of a ring on it, so that probably meant the person inside was a jeweler or silversmith. Nick read the sign once more: “Martin König, Silberschmied.” He closed the book and looked in the little window. Well, okay, he’d give this place a try. But if this didn’t work he would just go to a church and give them the cup.

  Why am I doing this? he asked himself again as he pushed open the shop door. But he knew the answer.

  For Fred.

  A jingle bell made the man behind the glass counter look up. Before he flipped his magnifying eyeglasses up, his eyes seemed to bu
g out like a cartoon character. Of course Nick had no idea what the shopkeeper was saying, only that it sounded something like: gutentagmineherr, wiefeilgewesengehabt und antwortensie?

  Excuse me? Nick could only hold up his hand and say what he’d been saying to everybody since they’d arrived in Frankfurt a week ago. “Uh — do you speak English? Sprechen sie English?”

  “Oh. Ja, of course. A little.” The man switched gears with a friendly nod and looked around Nick toward the door.

  “My dad’s in the Air Force, and we just moved here.”

  “Air Force, ja.” The man nodded as if he understood every word.

  “And I’m trying to find out something for a friend back home in Wyoming.”

  “Wyoming Cowboy, USA?” The man’s grin grew even bigger, as if John Wayne had walked into his shop instead of Nick Wilder, Typical American Kid. “Capital, Cheyenne. Cowboys and Indians. Buffalo burgers.”

  “Uh — sure. I guess.” Nick wasn’t sure how to answer the German version of a human atlas. “We didn’t have too much of that around where I lived. We did get a Burger King, though.”

  The man’s face fell, but only for a moment. He seemed to know more about Wyoming than Nick did.

  “You know the Old Faithful geyser?”

  “Saw it once. My folks took me. It was pretty cool, all the geysers and bubbly mud and stuff. But I was wondering — ” He pulled the tissue-wrapped chalice out of his backpack and set it on the counter. “Could you tell me where this came from?”

  “Oh! I see. Ja, natürlich. Of course.” The man nodded as if saluting the item and flipped his jeweler’s magnifying glasses back over his face for a better look. With a faint “hmm, ja, ja” he turned the cup around and around in his hands, delicately holding it up to the light. Nick listened to the tick-tock of a wall clock.

  “It’s a very gut piece,” Herr König finally announced as he set it down and flipped up the lenses once again. “Very fine. Very old. Could be quite valuable. May I ask where did you get it?”

  “A friend in the States. He wanted me to find out where it might have come from, and — ” well, no use telling the whole story, but — “he wanted me to return it for him.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t believe it.

  “I see.”

  “It’s not like you think. He didn’t steal it or anything. It’s just, I don’t know — ”

  “Natürlich.” Of course Herr König didn’t look convinced. And Nick could just imagine the guy’s thoughts: This American, whoever he was, probably had a guilty conscience, and now he wanted the boy to return a stolen chalice. A war trophy. Ja, that was it.

  “It was a big deal to him.” Nick tried one more time. “To get it back to where it came from, I mean.”

  Herr König nodded and ran his finger around the edge of the cup.

  Time to change course. “Do you know how old it is?” asked Nick.

  Ah, yes. At that Herr König held up a finger and squinted at the silver cup.

  “This is the interesting question. I cannot be sure, but the design tells me more than 200 years old, perhaps older. Late 1700s.”

  Nick whistled softly. That kind of thing had to be worth a lot of money. But Herr König held up a finger, like a professor explaining an important point.

  “As you can see, however, the inscription is much newer.” He flipped the glasses back down to read, while he traced the words with his finger and read: “Presented to Rev. Ulrich Becker, Versöhnungskirche, 12 June 1936.”

  Nick leaned a little closer to see. Really?

  “I don’t see how you can read that stuff.” He rubbed his eyes, and Herr König laughed.

  “I think your Mark Twain was right about some things.”

  Nick didn’t make the connection, and it must have showed on his face. “I’m not following you.”

  “Following me?” Now it was the jeweler’s turn to look confused. “But I go nowhere.”

  “No. I mean, I’m not sure what Mark Twain has to do with anything.”

  “Ahh!” The grin returned to Herr König’s face. “I thought all American young people read Mark Twain.”

  “Well, sort of. I read Tom Sawyer when I was in the fourth grade. Does that count?”

  “I don’t know who is counting. But it was your Mark Twain who said it is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man’s needle than it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.”

  “He sure got that right.” Nick had to smile, too. “Mark Twain, huh?”

  “Ja, ja. Twain.” Herr König returned to the engraving. “But now what about this Ulrich Becker? He is someone you know, perhaps?”

  “No.” And he had no idea about the church, either.

  “Versöhnungskirche.” Herr König scratched his chin and furrowed his brow. “This means in English, ‘Church of Bringing Back Together.’ But you have a better word for it, I feel.”

  “Pretty weird name for a church,” Nick said. But when he thought about it, maybe it wasn’t after all. Maybe that’s what churches were for. Bringing back together. He tried his best to think like a dictionary. Bringing back together —

  “Reconstruction Church!” Herr König was thinking, too. But no. Not quite. “Recondition Church.”

  “Recondition Church? That’s even weirder.”

  But then the jeweler snapped his fingers and smiled.

  “Reconciliation Church. That is the name. Reconciliation.”

  He said it carefully, like it didn’t roll off his tongue very easily. Well, it didn’t roll off Nick’s very easily, either. Almost as bad as the German version, and Mark Twain would’ve liked that one, too.

  “I was kind of getting used to the Church of Bringing Back Together. You think it’s here in Frankfurt?”

  They should be so lucky. But the jeweler shook his head no.

  “Nein, nein. There is no such church here. But now you make me neugierig — curious?”

  “You mean you think we can find it?”

  Herr König nodded. “I will find it for you. And your friend will feel not so guilty, ja?”

  “He’s not — ” Nick sighed. Oh, well. “Right.”

  And it seemed pointless to ask now, but it would have been nice to know —

  “And you wanted to ask how much it was worth?” The jeweler wrapped up the piece and handed it to Nick with a smile.

  “That’s not why I brought it to you. But — ”

  “Exactly.” The man laughed. “So just in case you’re curious, the newer inscription probably cuts the value in half, I would say.”

  “Half of?”

  “Five hundred American dollars, maybe. You will take care of it, then?”

  “Until we find out where it belongs.”

  Nick wrapped the tissue around it one more time and patted his treasure. If he’d known it was worth so much, he might have packed it in a couple more socks on the way over.

  “I’ll inquire about this Versöhnungskirche,” Herr König told Nick with a wink. “You come back in a few days.”

  5

  KAPITEL FÜNF

  FIRST DRAFT

  “I take pride in saying, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ ”

  Liesl sat at the kitchen table. She stopped her cassette tape player and hit rewind once more to hear the famous last line of that speech from the American president. Only this speech didn’t come from Ronald Reagan. Twenty-four years earlier, John F. Kennedy had stood in front of the city hall to deliver his own bit of history.

  She studied her history book for a minute — the one with the old photo of Kennedy and his wife — then began to write her paper.

  Even after President Kennedy told us he was a Berliner, she scribbled, the wall still stood. And even after President Reagan asked General Secretary Gorbechev to “tear down this wall,” it continues to stand today. But now the question is not if, but when it will come down. How much longer? And who will finally give the wall that push it so
deserves?

  She chewed on the end of her pencil, wondering how many others in her class would write the exact same stuff. Yeah, it was okay for starters. She liked the last line especially. Nice touch. Trouble was, everyone knew about Kennedy’s speech in 1963. And for sure everyone knew about Reagan’s challenge two years ago. She still remembered the crowds that pressed around her and Papa. Most of the kids in her school were probably there, too. So what was new about any of this? If she wanted to be a good news reporter, she had to learn to find another angle, something new that no one else would have. A personal story, maybe?

  She leaned back in her chair and glanced at her mother, knitting in the den. No. Mutti would never talk about that sort of thing, even though Liesl knew her mother could probably tell all kinds of great stories, if she wanted to. But she always said, “What’s past is best forgotten, dear.” And then of course there was the scene on her birthday at Onkel Erich’s. Mutti wouldn’t even let Liesl say her grandfather’s name.

  Yeah, whatever. What was he, some kind of Mafia crime boss? Liesl crumpled up her first try and tossed the paper at a wastebasket in the corner. Close.

  Her father, on the other hand — he might be talked into helping her. Once in a while he’d slipped and told her little bits and pieces about the tunnel they’d dug to escape from the East, the secret bomb shelter her mother had discovered when she was Liesl’s age.

  But only bits and pieces and only when Liesl’s mother wasn’t listening. Otherwise —

  “Liesl, could you turn that oven on, please? Your father should be home any minute, and he’s going to be hungry.”

  Liesl looked up at the kitchen clock. By eight-fifteen, well, he ought to be. In a way it served him right for working late so often. And as if he could smell the bratwurst, five minutes later Willi walked through the door with his usual bird-chirp whistle.

  “How are my girls?” He leaned down to kiss his wife, then stepped into the kitchen and mussed Liesl’s hair the way he always did. Never mind how many times she’d told him that she was too old for that sort of thing. She would never admit it, but she didn’t move away fast enough on purpose.

  “What’s the project?” he asked as he retrieved his plate and nearly dropped it on the table.