by Robert Elmer
That made her grandmother smile.
“Does she have a good reason for this, perhaps?”
“Well — ” Liesl thought about it. “Maybe sometimes. But not this time. All I’m doing is working on my school history paper, trying to get more information than just ‘The Berlin Airlift happened in 1948, as everyone knows,’ and ‘The Berlin wall, as everyone also knows, went up in 1961.’ That is so totally and completely boring. I refuse to just write what everybody else is writing.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me. So that’s why you came today?”
“Oh. Not a hundred percent. I came to visit, too.” Liesl pulled out her portable cassette tape recorder and found a place to plug it in the wall.
“That’s quite a fancy machine,” observed her grandmother. “I imagine your father gave it to you?”
Liesl nodded. “It’s what newspaper reporters use, so they can go back and write down their interviews. I hope it’s okay.”
“It’s okay, ja. I just don’t know if I’ve ever spoken into one that was quite as fancy as that one. You’ll have to promise I get to listen to myself afterward.”
“Sure!” Liesl smiled. This was already going better than she’d hoped. So she pressed the “record” button and held the microphone between them. Ahem! She cleared her throat.
“This is Liesl Marie Stumpff and it’s Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of September, 1989. I’m speaking with Brigitte Becker, my grandmother on my mother’s side, and we’ll be discussing family history.”
“My, don’t you sound just like a television news reporter.” Oma Brigitte wasn’t supposed to say that sort of thing. But what could Liesl do, except plow ahead with her prepared questions?
“Frau DeWitt, tell us where you lived and what you were doing in 1948, after the war.”
So Oma Brigitte talked about the food stamps and rationing and the soldiers and how hard they worked to rebuild the city. Which was all very good, but nothing Liesl hadn’t already learned in her history books.
“Those were difficult days — ”
But oh, she could talk about them! As Oma Brigitte went on Liesl’s arm got tired from holding out the microphone for so long, so she switched it from one hand to the other. Maybe this reporter stuff wasn’t as easy as she’d thought. Of course, she still had a few more questions to go.
“Tell us about your family after your first husband was killed — how you survived.”
Oma Brigitte paused, as if deciding how to answer. Then she nodded and went on, talking about their apartment, how they lived, what kind of work they did. But with each sentence she paused more between words. She waved her pudgy hands in the air and pulled her handkerchief from where she had parked it in her blouse, fussing with its edge. Was this what Liesl’s mother had meant about making her grandmother uncomfortable?
“Could you tell me how you met my grandfather?” Liesl asked, finally daring to bring it up. And after a long silence Oma Brigitte looked straight at Liesl with brimming eyes.
“We never talk about him, do we, Liesl?”
Liesl could only shake her head and study her recorder. That side of the tape had nearly finished. She would have to stop and turn it over.
“I’m sorry, Liesl. It’s wrong of me. Wrong of your — Is this still recording?”
Liesl hadn’t meant to time it this way, but the tape had finished and the record button popped up. She left the machine alone.
“Go ahead, Oma.” She’d had enough of playing the reporter for now.
“Are you sure you want to hear this? Of course you are. Here, thirteen years old, and all you know about your grandfather is that he was an American soldier and that he died before you were born. Is that right?”
“And that it was a plane crash.”
“I see. Your mother gave you the whole story, didn’t she?”
Liesl’s throat went dry as she gripped her chair and listened to Oma Brigitte.
Oma Brigitte said, “I don’t blame her. She had a lot to deal with as a child. Her missing father and who he was. Her polio. We found out later a nurse in the hospital routinely locked her in the closet when she couldn’t endure any more physical therapy and started to cry. Maybe you know that part.”
Liesl’s mouth fell open.
“All right, then.” Oma Brigitte wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. “It was a hard time. Many people didn’t survive. But you asked me about your grandfather, Sergeant DeWitt, from Cleveland, Ohio, America.”
Liesl nodded and scribbled a few notes in her notebook. She would look up how to spell the American names later.
“He was — he was a very good Chris tian man.” Oma Brigitte made a brave attempt to smile as she dabbed at her eyes again, and Liesl wondered if maybe she should have listened to her mother. But it was too late now. Her grandmother had started her story. “Always happy, always smiling. Very gentle. He spoke German as well as you or me. And he loved your Onkel Erich almost as much as he loved me.”
That brought a smile to the old woman’s face.
“But look at me now! Can you believe an old widow crying like this — after forty years?”
“It’s okay, Oma.” Liesl took her grandmother’s hand. “You can cry if you want to.”
“No, let me tell you something.” Oma had a point to make. “You know I’ve never told anyone this, and I only tell you now because you are a special granddaughter to me. My only granddaughter!”
True enough. And even though Liesl’s hands had begun to hurt in her grandmother’s grip, she could only nod and wait. Oma Brigitte took a breath and went on.
“I don’t cry because my American was killed before we could have a life together or because he never met his little daughter.” When she shook her head the barrette fell out of her hair, and the bun at the back of her head unraveled. “That’s all in God’s hands and I have no right to complain, but — ”
Liesl couldn’t make herself say anything. Finally her grandmother let go of her hands and pointed to a small dresser crowded into the corner of her apartment.
“In the top drawer there is a small bundle. Go and get it for me, please.”
Liesl did as requested, returning with a stack of envelopes tied neatly with brown packing string.
“The letter on top.” She pointed again, and the string fell apart at Liesl’s touch. These notes obviously hadn’t been read in years. And for the next hour Liesl learned what had really happened, the mystery she had wondered about that her mother had never wanted her to know.
She read the letter from the American’s parents in Ohio, USA, telling her that Fred had died in a New Jersey military hospital. And then the letter from the Department of the Air Force telling her that they had no record of any marriage.
“I couldn’t even call myself his widow.”
Liesl saw the hurt in her grandmother’s eyes, and she began to understand.
“But couldn’t his parents help?”
Oma Brigitte shook her head. “No one wanted us to get married, child. Not his commanding officer, not his parents, and especially not my first husband’s mother — the one you know as Uhr-Oma Poldi. Then, when he died, it was as if we’d never married. Except — ”
A whisper of a smile crossed her face as she stared out the window at the bustle of Hermannstrasse below. Did she keep watch over this street, remembering the past and its pain?
“Except for your mother. There was my proof that I had once been married to my Sergeant Fred DeWitt. But even then, the military would not believe me. They thought I was just trying to sneak my way in — pretending to be a military widow to get a free ticket out of Berlin to the United States. Isn’t that the way it goes?”
She chuckled, but in a sad kind of way.
“I’m so sorry,” Liesl said as she handed back the bundle of letters. Her grandmother glanced at her.
“Ja, ja.” The old woman shrugged. “I should think after all these years I would not feel so angry anymore. I suppose mein Gott is not through wit
h me.”
Liesl smiled. “You’re okay just the way you are, Oma.”
“Ach. You’re just saying that to get an extra cookie.”
Cookies? Now that Oma mentioned it, a cookie sounded like a very good idea.
“I don’t suppose you’ll want to use any of this story now for your school report?”
“Nein, of course not.” Liesl hadn’t written anything in her notebook for the past hour. She snapped it shut and put away her pencil to make her point. Newspaper reporters called it “off the record.”
“There is, though, a happier part of this story.”
Liesl raised her eyebrows, wondering what her grandmother would tell her next.
“But I’m afraid it is your onkel’s to tell, not mine.”
8
KAPITEL ACHT
DEAR ONKEL ERICH
Liesl never got over how odd it seemed, writing a letter to someone who lived so close — and yet so far away. She chewed on her pencil eraser for a moment. How far away did her uncle live? Two kilometers? Three? Close enough to walk. But the ever-present wall made it seem much farther.
So she started and stopped, wondering how to begin. She had decided to write a letter instead of calling, in case what she wanted to ask him didn’t quite come out right.
“Dear Onkel Erich,” she wrote, reading the words aloud as she used her best handwriting. “How are you? We’re doing fine. It’s been a couple of months since Mutti and I visited.”
Well, he knew that already. She crossed out the last sentence and started over.
“We’ve missed seeing you.”
No. That sounded dumb. She crossed it out and began one more time.
“I’m wondering if I could ask you a few questions for a paper I’m writing in my history class. Oma Brigitte said you would be able to tell me more about what happened when you were my age. Could you . . .”
And so she filled up her letter with questions, questions, questions. A lifetime of questions, saved up for as long as she could remember. Why were the Americans here, and how did people feel about them? How did the Americans treat people on the street? How did you feel about it? About him?
She tried twenty different ways to ask the same thing, trying to find out how he got to know Sergeant DeWitt and what kind of a man he was — but never mentioning his name. A couple of times she came close but decided — no. She hoped her uncle would see what she meant. Even though Oma Brigitte had given her a green light more or less, she still remembered how her mother had acted on her birthday.
She folded the letter and stuffed it in an envelope, addressed it, and prayed it would get across the border in one piece. Letters didn’t always. Even if it did, she really had no idea what her uncle would write back.
On the other hand, hadn’t he meant it when he’d said she had a right to know? She believed he would tell her.
He had to.
“That’s the craziest idea I’ve ever heard!”
Liesl stopped, puzzled. The voice came from down the hallway next to the St. Matthäuskirche sanctuary. But her mother’s evening council meeting at the St. Matthew’s Church should have ended by now.
So who was shouting in the side room?
“Oh, come on. You know better than that.”
“Well, even if you’re afraid to take a stand, I’m not.”
It sounded like a couple of teenage boys ready for a fistfight. Should she call the pastor? First she tiptoed a little closer to see what she could figure out.
“Nobody’s afraid here, Jürgen,” a quieter voice said. “We can’t just march out and make a scene when the time isn’t right.”
“And when will it ever be right? You’ll always find some reason to wait!” responded the first voice.
“Think about what happened to that East Berliner kid yesterday. The one who was shot. Doesn’t that tell you anything about how dangerous it’s getting?”
“You can whine and complain about how dangerous it is. But if we don’t do something big, more people will just get killed. More kids. Don’t you see?”
“But — ”
The voices echoed down the hallway, louder and louder. Liesl peeked into the room to see what kind of meeting — or battle — she had stumbled on.
Turned out to be about twenty intense-looking kids sitting in a big circle on wooden folding chairs. Mostly boys but a few girls, too. She thought most of them looked about sixteen years old; a couple looked older. And they had to be a little bit official since they were meeting in the church, and she didn’t think just anybody could do that. But they sure couldn’t agree. And the argument was so hot, no one seemed to notice her watching from the doorway. And she could pass for fifteen or sixteen, couldn’t she?
“Listen, we’re not going to solve this tonight.” One of the girls spoke up. “So the wall will just have to stay up for one more day. Why don’t we all go home and think about it, then come back tomorrow night to decide?”
Well, that sounded like a good idea to Liesl, judging by the way the conversation was going. And now she knew what kind of group this was.
These were the “criminals” her mother had been so angry about the other day. Kids who were trying to bring down the wall any way they could. A protest group that could possibly help her write the best paper in history — if she could just talk to some of them.
“Everyone in favor of voting tomorrow?” The five girls all raised their hands, as did a number of the boys. They outnumbered the hotheads — but barely. And that’s when someone noticed Liesl.
“You’re too late,” one of the kids called at her. “We’re just finishing up.”
“Oh!” Just then she remembered her mother was waiting for her, probably wondering why she hadn’t come by the council office yet. “Well, I have to get going, anyway.”
“Wait!” The girl who had wrapped up the meeting ran to follow her. “You don’t have to take off just yet.”
“But your meeting’s over.”
“Ja, but we usually hang around for a while after. The pastor doesn’t come around to lock the doors for another hour. Were you here to — ”
“To meet my mother. That’s all.”
“Oh. I thought — ”
“But I heard what you were saying,” Liesl blurted out, even as she kept a close eye out for her mother. “Are you planning to — I mean, is this a protest group?”
The tall, dark-haired girl’s expression turned serious, and she didn’t answer right away.
“That sort of depends.”
“Depends? On what?”
“Depends on who’s asking. We’re not an official church group, if that’s what you mean. Just a bunch of kids trying to — well, you can probably guess. Could you hear Jürgen all the way down the hall? He is so obnoxious!”
“Well — ” Liesl wasn’t ready to answer that question, considering who was joining them.
“Did someone mention my name?” Jürgen strutted up like a peacock. Liesl resisted the urge to reach out and wipe the smirk off his face. A couple of other boys had gathered around them, too.
“Hey, Katja, do we have a new recruit?” asked Jürgen. “Or maybe a spy?”
Katja stepped in front of Liesl like a shield, while the rest circled around as if for the kill.
“I’m no spy.” Liesl straightened her shoulders and stood a little taller, the way her mother always reminded her to. As if that would help against this school of sharks. “I’ve even — ”
They waited for her to finish.
“I’ve even smuggled some things across the border to East Berlin. Actually, more than once.”
Oh, brother. How was that for a crash landing? She realized she’d sounded a whole lot sillier than she’d hoped. Not a smooth delivery, not like Cher singing “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” on stage, though she wondered why she’d compared herself to Cher just now. Nobody was about to applaud her performance.
“Like what did you smuggle?” Jürgen, his face serious, stepped around Katja a
s he challenged Liesl. “Drugs?”
A few of the other boys snickered, and Liesl felt her cheeks flush. She wished she hadn’t opened her big mouth. Then she thought, What can it hurt to tell the truth? She crossed her arms and faced him.
“Bibles, actually.”
What do you think of that?
At first no one said anything. They just stared at her. Jürgen had finally picked up his jaw from the floor and cleared his throat, when they heard the sound of steps clicking down the hall coming toward them.
“Liesl?” Her mother called as she got closer. “Liesl, are you down here?”
Extremely good timing — sort of. Or maybe not.
“I’ve got to go.” Liesl wasted no time bailing out of the little room. So much for her prize-winning paper filled with firsthand accounts of the West German protest movement! But she didn’t want to have to explain this group to her mother, especially considering the argument she’d heard them having. Before she slammed the door behind her, though, Jürgen’s in-charge voice reached her: “Hey! Don’t forget we’ll meet again tomorrow night, Bible smuggler. Same time, same place.”
But Liesl had no idea what to tell her parents the next day. How could she convince them to let her go out alone — and did she even want to? She could imagine the scene:
Mutti, I’m going out to get into deep trouble with a gang of insane kids who want to get themselves killed in a foolish protest against the wall.
Really? That’s nice, dear. How do you plan to do that?
We’re talking about maybe charging the barbed wire with signs that say “Give Peace a Chance.”
Oh, that would be perfect, wouldn’t it? Liesl stabbed at a sausage on her dinner plate, sending a little spray across the table — whoops — as she twirled it through the gravy.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Her mother could read minds, which in this case could be pretty dangerous. As a defense, Liesl immediately stuffed the big piece of sausage into her mouth, way more than she should chew at one time.
“I guess you are.” Frau Stumpff shook her head. “Mind your manners, bitte. I can’t be here all the time to clean up after you. In fact, I’m running a little late now. I told you I have a commission meeting tonight, didn’t I?”
