by Alex Cugia
“ ... and then we’re there. No distance at all. Isn’t that wonderful? ... Ulrike? Ulrike!”
She blinked as Kai waved a hand in front of her face, looked at the plans uncomprehendingly for a moment, and then smiled up at him. “Yes, wonderful. But maybe if you just explain some of that again to me ... ”
He laughed. “I’ll get you some coffee and then we can eat and I’ll tell you all about it later. Bernhard and Klaus said they were coming over, didn’t they? We’ll talk about it then.”
Just after eight the doorbell rang and Kai opened it to Bernhard who motioned downwards with his finger and raised his eyebrows as he stepped into the apartment. Kai banged the door shut, keeping the catch open, and then immediately opened it silently and leaned over the rail to catch sight of Frau Schwinewitz scuttling back to her ground floor apartment. Moments later the street door opened and as Klaus made for the stairs Kai noticed Frau Schwinewitz’s door opening a crack. “At least I give her plenty of exercise!” Kai thought with amusement as he waited for Klaus to arrive.
Dropping the catch and locking the door fully they all shook hands. Kai again spread out the papers on the table and turned up the volume of the music.
“Look, guys. See what Thomas brought me today. Look at these. This confirms everything I've been telling you about. Look at the detail!”
“Remind me how this idea of breaking into the subway tunnel came up.” Bernhard asked.
“Thomas’s idea. He’s at university in West Berlin and he uses this line regularly. He saw the ghost stations in East Berlin because the train ran through them although they never stopped. They were a kind of preserved bit of the past he said, unchanged since before the war, but closed since the Wall was put up. He wondered if it might be a way of getting out of East Berlin. Most of the digging had been done so it was just a case of finding a way to break into the subway itself and then following the tunnel to a station in the West. And then I found this apartment, about as close as you can get to the line itself, and with that utility room in the basement.”
“Great idea! I like it.” said Bernhard. “How far away are we here?”
“I’ve been working it out from the plans and it’s about twenty metres from the edge of the building here to the wall of the tunnel as it enters the station. It looks further from the street but that’s because we’re looking at the building itself and the tunnel’s on this side, luckily.”
“How deep is it?”
Kai squinted at some figures on the edge of the plan. “The base, that’s the rails I suppose, seems to be at 28m. Our basement’s underground but only just and so that means the floor’s maybe, what, five metres at most underground, less probably. God! We can’t dig down that much.” They stared at each other in dismay.
“That’s not right, though, surely?” Bernhard said. “Sometimes when you walk along the street at the back of the station you can hear the trains right underneath. It can’t be 28m, it just can’t be.”
He spun round the plan and ran a finger down the columns of numbers at the edge, then smiled.
“No, look. 28m is the foundation, the bedrock. The tunnel floor is ten metres here and, look, it rises in this direction so it’s just under eight metres at this edge, maybe nine or so in the middle of the plan. And the tunnel roof’s five metres above the tunnel floor so that’s pretty much the same level as the basement floor. We’ll have to dig down a bit from the basement floor anyway, maybe a metre, couple of metres at most, and if we keep things level we should hit the tunnel wall somewhere in the middle, maybe two to three metres above the tracks anyway.”
Kai slapped his forehead and rested his head on his cupped hands for a moment then beamed shamefacedly at Bernhard. “I was worried there, thought we were so close and it was turning out all wrong. OK, let’s get going. It’s not even nine, we can get started straight away, do a couple of hours at least tonight.” Kai swallowed his coffee, grabbed his coat and stood waiting expectantly for Bernhard and Klaus who sat calmly looking over the plans together, occasionally sipping coffee.
“Come on!” he urged. “We’re wasting time!”
“Sit down Kai! Have some more coffee.” Bernhard leaned back in his chair and smiled at Kai’s impetuosity. “You know the story of the two bulls? One day, as an old bull stood munching grass the young bull sharing his field came thundering up to him. ‘Grand-dad! Grand-dad!’ he bellowed ‘There must be thirty new heifers just brought into that field up there. Let’s rush up the hill and shag one or two. Come on! Come on! We’re wasting time.’ And the old bull looked placidly him, glanced up the hill at the young cows, bent and took another mouthful of grass and chewed it reflectively while the young bull stamped and snorted and foamed with excitement. ‘Hmm.’ he said ‘OK, but let’s just amble up the hill instead when we want to, save our energy, and then we can shag the lot.’”
Kai laughed. “OK, granddad! But why not get started? Why wait?”
“We have to break through the floor to make a start. That’s concrete and however we do it that’s going to be noisy. You told me Saturday’s when Schwinewitz goes to Normannenstrasse for her weekly debriefing. She’ll be away with her handlers all morning like the good snitch she is. That’s when we have to break through. Now where’s that beer you promised me?”
“Can you get sacks?” Kai asked Klaus. “And how do we dump the soil we dig out? What about taking to your site and adding it to the stuff being dug out there. Any problems with that?”
“Shouldn’t think so. There’s a dozen sacks in the van already and I can get more on Monday. That should be plenty. They’re all marked ‘Kugia Konstruction’ so that won’t be suspicious if anyone sees them. You might have to help me sometimes, Bernhard. Got some wood too, struts and planks for the tunnel supports. Let’s fetch these in later and get them to the basement when your woman downstairs has gone to bed.”
*
By nine on the Saturday Bernhard and Klaus were again in the apartment, drinking coffee as Kai leaned over the rail watching for Frau Schwinewitz to leave. Minutes later the three men, accompanied by a protesting Ulrike, slipped down the stairs carrying a pickaxe, a stout spade and other tools, including a small electrically driven pneumatic drill, face mask and ear muffs which Bernhard had removed temporarily when the construction site had closed down for the weekend.
“Why do I have to be there? I can’t dig. I’ve got stuff to do this morning.”
“Sorry Ulrike” said Bernhard “but we need you. Old Schwinehag may be out for the morning but we can’t risk alerting anyone at all. Someone might come down and if they do you need to warn us to keep quiet.”
He handed her a small piece of wood wrapped around with wire, a push button on one side and the other with a small plastic box covering part of the electronics. “I need you to stand in the corridor and if you hear someone coming just press that button firmly for a second or so. Then when it’s all clear again, press it quickly three times.”
In the basement room the three men stood looking at the floor, working out where to break through. The building was old but also had been put up during a period of cost cutting and shoddy construction and the floor carried the characteristic crack pattern of a poorly controlled initial mix, perhaps worsened through frost damage during some of the severe winters when the basement was largely unused.
“Come on! Come on! We gotta train to catch and it won’t wait. WhooooHoooo! WhooooHoooo! Let’s get this baby goin’!” Kai sang. He pointed to a spot close to the west wall of the room, facing towards Alexanderplatz, where the cracks were more numerous and deeper and where a few small plugs of concrete had pulled out and left conical dips two or three centimetres across running in a rough arc. “What about here?”
“Sure. Seems good as anywhere.” Bernhard propped up the alarm box where he could see it, pulled on the ear muffs and mouth mask, plugged in the jack drill and switched on the power at the socket. “Better put your fingers in your ears if you plan to stay. This is loud!”
>
He held the cross bar firmly in his left hand, grasped the other handle with his right, pushed the bit into a small cavity in the floor and pulled the trigger.
Despite the warning the volume of noise in the small room shocked Kai. The roar of the powerful motor combined with the harsh thumping screech of the bit pounding and turning on the concrete blasted off the room’s hard surfaces, bouncing and echoing around them, defeating his fingers in his ears and setting his teeth on edge. “Jesus Christ!”
Almost immediately the red light on the alarm box glowed and went off. Bernhard switched off the drill and the three stood listening.
“You two wait here till I find out what’s going on. Maybe that woman’s back early. Best I go and check with Ulrike.”
The corridor was empty as Kai left the room and he found Ulrike half way up the stairs looking worried. “God! Kai. What was all that noise? It sounded like you were demolishing the building.”
“That’s a bit awkward if it’s so noisy. Let’s see what it’s like in the hall.”
They walked up the stairs, opened the door at the top and stood in the empty hall. Frau Schwinewitz’s apartment door was firmly closed and they had to assume she was still out being debriefed. Ulrike pressed the button on the alarm device three times in quick succession and in a moment the dull roar of the drill began again, reduced by the distance and the closed doors but still clearly audible.
“Music! That might help. You stay here in the hall Ulrike. They might as well get on with it but watch out for anyone coming. Send the signal if any of the doors open.”
Kai ran up to the apartment and returned quickly with the ghetto blaster, taking it down to the basement. The drilling noise stopped, replaced by the first track of Never Mind the Bollocks played at full volume, the sound penetrating the hall, somewhat muffled but still powerful, then stopped.
“Klaus complained! Said that racket was worse than the drill.” Kai laughed as he reappeared. “I told him he could stand in the corridor if he didn’t appreciate great music. Let’s hear it with the drill. Bernhard’s going to run it more slowly to try to cut the noise down.” He pressed the button on the alarm device three times and the shoe stamping of Holidays in the Sun broke out, overlaid with what might have been mistaken for an eccentric and rapid boot stamping variant, a crazed cover version, had it not gone on insistently through the following tracks. Kai stood listening for several minutes, walking about the hall and up to the first floor.
“Hmm. It’ll do, I suppose. Have to. At least it hides it a bit and maybe it won’t take too long to break through the floor. You’d best stay up here. I bet it’ll be Braun from the first floor who’ll come nosing around, though, complaining about ‘that racket’ if he hears anything. You know the one I mean, him always going on about decadent youth listening to pop music and always making too much noise.” He mimicked a sour face, moved his head around and whined. “‘Wasn’t like that in our day!’ Pillock!”
He returned to the basement. Klaus was standing outside the door, coughing. Kai entered quickly and found Bernhard still hunched over the drill pounding away at the floor, a hazy smoke of cement dust now filling the room and an irregular trench connecting the pits, a little over half a circle of about a metre wide. Bernhard grinned at him and continued working, starting on the second half, poking into and enlarging cracks in order to join up with the existing trench. Sometimes the work went well, the drill blade cracking and ripping the concrete easily and then slowing and jumping off harder elements in the aggregate. Absorbed in his task Bernhard failed to notice the warning light come on and Kai had to punch his arm to get him to stop. They turned down the volume of the music and stood trying to hear.
“Someone going out or coming in, I guess. It’s getting on for half past ten, now, so we should have at least a couple of hours before Schwinewitz gets back. How much longer do you reckon, Bernhard?”
“Not long. Ten minutes maybe to complete the circle I guess. Then we need to break that bit of concrete away – we’ll use the sledgehammer for that, less noise, less continuous noise anyway.”
In reality it took much longer, the concrete being much more irregular in thickness than Bernhard had realised. Smashing at it with the hammer or the pickaxe had little effect other than sending chips flying and occasionally running a crack. Ulrike had become angry at the enforced waiting, insisted on returning to the apartment and Kai had taken her place in the hall. It was now approaching midday. Bernhard had returned to using the hammer drill and Kai was getting tired of hearing the same Sex Pistols’ songs over and over. He was beginning to worry whether Frau Schwinewitz would return before they’d finished. As she hardly left the building otherwise that was potentially serious. In any case, the hammer drill had to be back in the tool store at the construction site by 7.30 on Monday morning.
Suddenly, the background thumping of the drill over the raucous music stopped and was replaced by erratic dull thuds. The music stopped as well and shortly afterwards Klaus appeared through the basement door.
“We’ve done it! Bernhard cut through nearly all of it – it was over half a metre thick at one point. I think they’d just tipped concrete in here and there to fill up holes they’d left, real cheapjack building. Anyway, there’s a big hole in the floor now so we’re OK.”
The three of them worked in pairs in half hour shifts during the afternoon and late into the evening, camouflaged for sound by a variety of bands, one person digging and another filling the sacks with excavated soil and rubble. At first it was easy. They dug down a metre below the floor and then started a horizontal, slightly sloping tunnel west towards Alexanderplatz.
As Kai ended a digging shift he stretched and casually tried to lift one of the filled bags.
“God! That’s heavy!” He lifted it again, raising it from the floor with difficulty, and walked a few paces round the room before it slipped from his hands. “Do we have to fill them so much? That’s not going to be easy moving them up stairs and out to the van. And if Schwinewitch is around ... ”
“But we’re also running out of bags. Look, we’ve already filled ten out of the ones I brought over and that’s before we’ve even really started on the proper tunnel. I’d no idea the earth was going to be so heavy or so bulky, once we’d dug it out. This isn’t going to work is it? We’ve got ten, twenty times as much to dig out, how can we carry all that out without being seen? And if we don’t do that where can we put it all? Maybe we should just forget the whole idea.” Klaus sat down gloomily on one of the filled bags.
“Bugger that! I’m not forgetting it.” said Kai furiously. “I’ve had enough of this country and I’m getting out. And this tunnel is how we’re going to do it.”
“I don’t like it here either but there’s just too many things that could go wrong. " Klaus objected. "It’s not just shifting the earth. Alexanderplatz is still used for the other lines isn’t it? There’ll be people around, passengers, police, Stasi, everyone you don’t want, till midnight anyway, probably later. I bet there are guards patrolling when it’s closed as well.”
“I’ve been into all this with Thomas and we’ve checked things out. Yes, the station’s still used but it’s an entirely different part, different lines. The bit we're breaking into is really another station completely. No one’s going to be around in that part, not even maintenance. No one’s been there for years. It’s completely shut off, deserted.”
“I still don’t like it.” said Klaus. “The more I think of it now the more crackpot it seems. Someone’s going to hear us or see or we’ll get run over by a train or step on the life rail or something. And you know what happens if we get caught. If we’re lucky not to get shot trying to escape we’ll be in jail for ever. The foreman was complaining about shortage of bags this morning and fussing about the drill not being where he’d left it. And this thing about getting rid of the earth has tipped it for me. It’s just too risky.”
“I’m with Kai.” said Bernard. “Everything’s risky but
I’m getting out, whatever it takes. I’ll eat the fucking earth myself if that’s the only way we can get rid of it, just to get out of this shitty country. We’ll work something out tomorrow. Come on, Klaus. Let’s get these tools back to the van and you can give me a lift home.”
Chapter 3
Sunday September 3 through to Saturday September 9 1989
BERNHARD and Klaus returned together the following day, Sunday. Klaus was reluctant, nervous and anxious about getting caught and ending up either shot or imprisoned but Bernhard had insisted Klaus drive him over.
“Think about what you can do when you get there!” said Kai. “Think of the freedom. None of this looking over your shoulder all the time. None of this thinking twice before you say anything. And you’re a skilled carpenter, you’ll be able to pick up a job in no time. Think of the money you’ll make! Think of all the rubbish you’ll be able to buy, stuff which you just can't get here!”
“True. And I do think of that. I want that. But I also think how really risky it is. And then there’s Ingrid. You know Ingrid, Bernhard, she's in accounts. Well, we’ve got together and sometimes she stays over. I don’t want to lose her.”
