The dour woman clearly wasn't in a good mood this morning. She scowled when she saw us in work clothes and brushed herself off, even though I was sure we hadn't gotten any dirt on her.
"I excused their poor manners while you were out of town," Frau Eberhart told my mother. "But I thought they'd have improved again when you returned, not worsened."
"You bumped into them," my mother snapped. "You should be the one apologizing!"
Frau Eberhart straightened herself up and evaluated my mother's appearance. "I thought you were a church-going lady. But it seems you have more important plans today."
Mama and I looked at each other. With so much else to think about, none of us had remembered today was a Sunday.
Mama attempted to excuse it with a joke. "Well, Frau Eberhart, I suppose some days the Lord wants us in his house, and some days he wants us going about his work. Which are you choosing?"
Frau Eberhart reacted by wrinkling her nose, as if we smelled. Maybe we did. "And the Lord's work is gardening? Did your daughter mention that she promised me some of the harvest from that garden? She seemed to think it might encourage me to keep quiet, in case I saw anything suspicious."
Mama smiled at Fritz and me. "Why don't you two go on ahead? We have to talk, mother to mother."
Fritz grabbed my arm and pulled me off with him. By the time I looked back, they were already engaged in what looked like a very tense conversation. Something had changed in Mama over the last few days. She looked tired and worried, just as we all did. But she seemed younger, and stronger too, as if digging the tunnel had reclaimed the spirit of who she used to be.
"Frau Eberhart was right," I said. "I did sort of bribe her."
"Let Mother work it out," Fritz said. "Our job is to dig."
After we made it into the shelter, Fritz and I had the luxury of deciding what to do about the second tunnel without Mama getting a vote. We knew what she'd have wanted, and that once she made up her mind, the decision would be final. For Mama, any risk was too much risk.
But Fritz thought Mama had made some good points last night. "Other families have escaped through tunnels," he said. "If the Stasi have gone to such efforts to barricade the ground above us, why not below as well?"
I disagreed. "Why didn't Officer Muller warn us, then?"
"Officer Muller never said he was on our side."
Fritz was right about that. If anything, Muller had promised just the opposite -- that if we were discovered he would be there for our arrest.
I listened again with my ear pressed against the tunnel wall, but this time there were no sounds. Either the other tunnel had moved farther away from us, or else nobody was digging right now.
I grabbed the shovel and began digging in that direction. "Whatever is ahead of us, we can't quit now," I said. "Maybe it's Stasi, but what I fear even more is missing Papa's tunnel."
So Fritz relented and worked with me. We had to move carefully because of other pipes overhead, and there were large rocks in front of us. But at least we were digging again.
Mama joined us soon after. When we asked what had taken so long, she said, "Frau Eberhart believes you two are up to something. I tried to convince her otherwise, but she insisted I was in denial. 'Children today are more slippery than they used to be. A lazy mother can miss the signs.' " Mama huffed. "She sits outside all day like a lump and then accuses me of laziness?"
I shrugged. "You're not lazy, but in all this mud, I can believe that I'm quite slippery!"
Mama laughed, then grew serious again when she said, "Our conversation moved to Herr Krause's death. She's upset about it, just like the rest of us. She admitted that she was the one who had turned him in, but also insists she had no idea what they would do to him. I told her to go inside and stop asking so many questions, or there would be more deaths."
"Does she suspect about the tunnel?" Fritz asked.
"I don't think so. But she didn't go inside either."
"Shh! Quiet down!" I hissed. "Shh!" I paused from digging and pressed my ear against the dirt. The sounds in the other tunnel had begun and they were closer than ever. It was impossible to know exactly, but I was sure whoever was on the other side must be within an arm's length of us.
Then, very high up, a stick poked sideways through the dirt. It was no rounder than an earthworm, but there was lantern light on the other side, far more light than what we allowed ourselves here. None of us breathed.
The stick went forward and wiggled as if the person on the other end was feeling for more dirt or some rock. Feeling nothing, it was withdrawn, and then the more focused beam of a flashlight came through.
Still, we said nothing and didn't even move. We had been discovered, but by whom?
Then, in a low voice I well remembered from my childhood, someone sang an even more familiar tune. "They dig and they rake and they sing a song."
Papa.
I was aware that it could all go horribly wrong.
-- Gunter Wetzel, escaped East Germany with his family in a hot-air balloon, 1979
Fritz immediately started to widen the hole, but after a quick greeting, Papa warned him to stop.
"Why?" It took real effort to keep from kicking the dirt wall down entirely, and my tone showed it.
"Sweet Gerta, how I've missed you." Papa's voice wavered a bit, then became serious again as he said, "We're too shallow. We've been measuring this morning and we're certain that we've been slowly tunneling uphill. Last night we heard the dogs over us; they might even be able to detect us below. We heard barking and maybe we're the reason why."
"Then let's dig lower!" The impatience I felt streamed through me like raw energy. The fact that we were just sitting here, so close and yet conversing through a tiny hole in the dirt, was impossibly frustrating.
Mama stepped forward and put her hand on my shoulder. "Patience, Gerta. This must be done right."
There was silence and then my father's voice broke as if he was crying. "Katharina? My dear wife, is that you?"
I looked up at my mother and in the low light saw tears on her cheeks. "It's me, I'm here," she answered. "Aldous --"
"I tried to get back to you, my love. All this time --"
Mama pressed her hand against the wall, as if touching it brought her closer to my father. Suddenly, I felt shame for my anger toward her these past four years, when my father seemed to have held on to nothing but his love for her. Who was I to judge her when he had not? In apology, I wrapped an arm around her and nestled closer as she brought me against her side.
Then another voice came through. "Mama?" I didn't recognize it, but only one other person would have said that word.
"Dominic?" Mama pressed even closer against the dirt. She folded a little, and for the first time I began to understand how painful it must have been to be separated from one of her children. Tears filled my eyes, but with such a filthy hand I could only let them fall. Behind me, even Fritz sniffed with emotion.
"You never should've dug this tunnel, Fritz," Papa said. "The danger of it --"
"Careful who you blame," Fritz said. "It was Gerta who started this."
"Gerta?" He stopped and chuckled lightly. "I see that she is no less headstrong than the night I left. My wonderful, brave girl, I should've known." Even from here, I heard his sigh.
"You suggested it, Papa," I said. "I saw you."
"I only wanted you to know we were coming," he said. "So you could be ready."
Fritz gave me a look. That was exactly what he had told me.
Then Papa continued, "But now that we're this close, I'm glad you did. We'd have been another couple of weeks to get over to you."
"Let us keep digging," Fritz said. "We could open this tunnel in the next few hours."
"Then we must dig deeper," Papa said. "I don't like the way the dirt looks above us."
"It's like clay beneath our feet," Fritz said. "It'll take a month to bridge the tunnels if we have to go lower." But he started anyway.
The tunnel wasn
't wide enough here for Mama and I to help, and Fritz wasn't emptying enough of the dense, packed soil to require us to remove it. Papa said he had to go back to help carry out some dirt. We promised him that we would wait there.
Hour after hour passed with very slow progress on our end. The dirt on Papa's side was collapsing and sealed up the hole he had made with the stick and even the little gap Fritz had made. Then Fritz suggested he and Mama should better fortify our end of the tunnel for when the entire gap was broken open.
"We need more bricks," Fritz said, eying the dirt above him. "If it starts to collapse when we join these tunnels, I want to be ready."
"There're still some bricks left upstairs," I offered. "Not many, but maybe one more pile on the main floor."
"Be careful," Mama said. "Send them down in the bucket when you're ready and I'll unload them into the tunnel."
I hurried out of the shelter, up the ladder into the basement, and then up the stairs onto the main floor. The bricks were indeed there as I had thought, but it occurred to me that in this daytime light, I could possibly see into the Death Strip and confirm that our propped-up door had repaired the dark patch on the ground. It was a terrible risk to be up there with no shadows to keep me in the safe zones. But I was also becoming used to risks, and this one had to be taken.
I crept to the upper floor, aware of each step I took and of even the smallest movements I made. I went slowly and kept my body pressed to the wall as if I were part of it.
The window in front of me was missing its glass, but if I stayed low, that would be the best place for a view. All it would take was for a watchtower guard to look at this building while my head was visible and it would be over. Alarms would sound, dogs would be called, and shots would be fired. Nobody would be quicker to acknowledge the stupidity of me being up here on the very same day as we would surely break through to my father.
But I thought about what Papa had said, that they had gone too shallow. And that worried me.
I would look very quickly. No hesitations. No stares. Just the quickest glance into the center of the Death Strip. So fast that if I happened to catch the corner of a guard's eye, when he looked again I would be gone and he would assume it was a trick of the light.
The best news would be to see the dark spot was entirely gone. There wasn't much chance of that, but I hoped at least it was no worse. And then I would look a little farther on, to Papa's side of the tunnel.
After brushing away the sweat from my palms, I peeked through the window, but suddenly couldn't tear myself away. I had heard the phrase "frozen in fear," but never understood it before, not like I did in that moment. When I finally forced myself back against the wall, my heart was racing so much that I could barely breathe. Nobody had seen me, or at least, no alarms were sounding. But our problem was just as awful.
A line seemed to be caving in on Papa's side. It wasn't just one little sunken area, like with ours. Papa's entire tunnel was going to collapse!
"Stop!" I cried once I reentered the tunnel. I flew past my mother in the shelter, ignored her question about what had taken me so long, and grabbed Fritz's arm. "Papa's tunnel is collapsing, just like ours. I saw it. Just now, I went to the upper floor and saw it."
Fritz's mouth opened, then shut. And then he used the handle of the shovel to push another hole through to Papa's side.
Papa wasn't there, but Dominic was, and Fritz relayed our panicked message. Instantly, we heard Dom run off, calling for our father. When Papa returned to talk with us, Fritz told him the danger signs we had noticed earlier on our end.
"I see it here!" Papa said. "There are fissures in the earth where it's begun to separate. How have I missed it?"
"Gerta said the problems run through most of the length of your tunnel. You have to prop it up now," Fritz cried. "Use anything you have, brick or wood, or anything that will hold it up."
"Get out of your end," Papa said. "If our tunnel collapses, yours will go down too."
"We can't!" Fritz said. "We have to finish tonight. If I don't report for military service tomorrow, they'll arrest me."
"Do not report there," Papa said. "Do you hear me? If they get hold of you, we'll never get you out again. Come back early in the morning. If I haven't stabilized this tunnel by then, it'll be too late anyway. I want you all to make preparations to leave. Either you pass through this tunnel tomorrow, or you'll all have to leave the city and hide until we can figure out another way."
"Aldous!" Mama cried. "If it collapses and you're in there --"
"Get out," Papa said. "Now that I'm looking, the failure is worse than I thought."
"We can help!" Mama said.
Papa's voice was firm, just the way I remembered it on the night he said good-bye four years ago. "Please, Katharina, get my children out of that tunnel. I can't work if I have to worry about you too."
We had no choice. We ran from the tunnel without knowing whether we would ever see it again. Whether we would ever see our father again. Or ever again have a chance at freedom.
No one knows where the shoe pinches, but he who wears it. -- German proverb
As we walked home, Mama made us wipe our tears and told us to smile and properly greet everyone we passed.
"People get caught when they look like people who should be caught," she said. "Smile."
"What about Papa?" I mumbled.
"You will see him tomorrow. Save a hug and kiss for him until then, because he will want it." Mama spoke with confidence, but I didn't know whether that was because she believed it, or because she wanted me to believe it.
There was a time in my childhood when I accepted as fact everything my parents said simply because it never occurred to me they could be wrong. But Papa had said he would return from his visit to the west, and he was wrong. Mama had said the wall wouldn't last and we'd all be together again. That was wrong too. So wrong that to make things right again, we had now put everything at stake, including our lives. I wished I could return to that time of my childhood just long enough to believe my father would be okay simply because my mother had pronounced it so. But I had seen too much reality to ever go back. As it was, the best I could do was to pretend to believe her, so she would worry less about me.
Mama assumed she had cheered me up and went on to say, "Until we're all together tomorrow, we are going to pack our clothes and wash ourselves and clean the apartment."
"Clean?" I asked. "Why, if we're only going to leave it?"
"When we're gone, Stasi will be everywhere in our home." It was Mama's German pride speaking now. "I won't have them saying the Lowe family are pigs. We are going to clean it."
Fritz and I didn't argue. There was no point in it.
We returned home with only a passing comment from Frau Eberhart that we were back earlier than usual. Mama walked past as if she hadn't heard her, but I curtsied politely and we hurried back to our apartment.
None of us needed reminding this time about the microphones. Mama only announced that the gardening could wait for a day. Today, we would clean and get Fritz packed to leave for the military tomorrow. It was a perfect cover story for our real purposes.
I was given the job of cleaning the front room, which I still thought was ridiculous, but I didn't say anything. I couldn't, because any complaint would be overheard, flagged, and reported. So I pretended to be cheery, but compensated by giving my mother irritated looks whenever she passed by.
Mama prepared an early supper for us, more of Herr Krause's food, and Fritz and I ate as if it was our last meal. Fritz said my constant hunger was all in my mind, but I noticed he acted the same way, always eating whatever was available in case no food came to us tomorrow.
"I'm supposed to be at work tomorrow for my new job," Mama announced. "But I need to go back to Oma Gertrude this evening and make sure she's okay. I might not make it home by curfew, in which case I'll return first thing in the morning."
Fritz and I looked back at her and nodded our understanding. The visit wasn't
to be sure Oma Gertrude was okay. Mama was going to say good-bye. It would be her last chance to see her mother, ever. As guilty as I had felt for starting the tunnel without Mama's knowledge, I couldn't imagine how she must feel for leaving without being able to bring Oma Gertrude with us. The fact that they were being pulled apart was my fault, and I hoped Mama could one day forgive me for that.
Partially to compensate for my guilt, I offered to clean up the kitchen so my mother could get on the road as soon as possible. Besides, I felt more worried than ever because we were so close now, and because I couldn't be at the tunnel tonight. Even if my father survived a collapse of his tunnel, Grenzer officers with their long rifles in hand would be there to greet him at the surface.
Mama left as soon as she finished eating. Afterward, Fritz helped me finish in the kitchen and then said he had his own errand to run. It shouldn't have been any of my business where he was going, but I needed to know. It had to be something good to justify leaving me alone on such a dangerous night.
"Claudia," he said. "She's often at the clubs in the evening. I just want to say hello."
Or good-bye. That would probably be a hard conversation, especially since she would never know how final his farewell was. I nodded and he darted out the door.
After he left, it was a very long evening for me. There was nothing more to pack, or to clean, and nothing I could concentrate on for more than a few seconds. I thought it might be nice if I had someone to say good-bye to. Anna. But I'd sooner talk to Frau Eberhart than my former friend.
Curfew began when it was dark out, and it was only a few minutes after that when Fritz came trudging into the apartment, with his head held low. He looked up at me with heavy eyes and started toward his room.
"How did it go?" I was hopeful, though from his appearance, I already had my answer.
He only muttered, "I really did love her, Gerta. More than she ever loved me back, apparently."
Only then did I understand his full purpose in going. It wasn't to say good-bye to Claudia. It was to ask her to come with us. I wasn't sure how much Fritz had said or what promises he possibly could have offered her about their life together -- they were both so young. But I knew he still loved her.
A Night Divided Page 17
