The Wall: And Other Stories

by Jurek Becker

  I say: “There was a devil behind the window.”

  Julian says: “There are people living there, stupid.”

  He finds our street. I hardly recognize it in the dark. We walk past a fence where two loose boards seem familiar to me. I push one of them with my finger and am right. I could show many a trick in our street. I ask Julian why he doesn’t simply take the next house; yet I know he is afraid it might be locked up too. He says: “I know what I’m doing.”

  Then I feel fine because my head feels better. We would have been inside a house long ago if Julian felt as cold as I do. I think: I hope he won’t feel warm for too long. Some day or other I’ll be the leader, then I’ll wear warm clothes. He asks: “Are you still there?” We go past my house—he can think only of his own; without him I could walk in if I wanted to. I think of Father’s flashlight. I must be tired. We waste no words over the workshop of dead Muntek, the cobbler; in my day, anyway, he was alive and used to chase us. I have never felt so cold in my street—the wind blows around my bare legs—but Julian is the first to sneeze. He stands outside his house and can’t get through the door. He rattles it a bit and kicks it a bit, but the door stays shut.

  I say: “Don’t make such a racket!”

  He answers: “Shut up.”

  Since it is a long way to my house, I go to the next one, and that’s open. I call Julian; we’re very close to our fortune. The house has three floors. We start at the top because Julian wants it that way. On the landing it’s black, a door opens, a dark-gray hole. My heart pounds because I don’t know whether Julian has opened the door or a stranger, until Julian says: “What are you waiting for?” In the room there is a confusion of things: overturned chairs, a table, an open cupboard in which our hands find nothing.

  I ask: “What’s that stink here?”

  Julian says: “You stink.”

  I sit down on a broken bed. Julian goes to the window and opens it. It gets lighter. He leans far out and asks: “D’you know where our camp is?”

  I go over to him and say: “No.”

  He shuts the window again and says: “I do.” That’s Julian for you. On the way back to the door we stumble against a bucket, where the stink comes from.

  All the rooms in the house are empty in the same way. In one there is an object that is much too heavy to take along. Julian says: “That’s a sewing machine.” In one we find a box half full of coal—what use is coal in the camp? In one the handle falls off the door. I pick it up and decide to take it along—it’ll do for a start. Julian takes the handle away from me and replaces it. In the next house, in the very first room, Julian finds something. He examines it and soon calls out: “Wow, they’re binoculars!” I have never heard this word. He says: “Come here and look through them.” I go over to him at the window, he holds his discovery up to my face, and sure enough you can see things in it that no one can see with ordinary eyes, although it’s night. Julian shows how I have to turn the little wheel to make the pictures fuzzy or clear, but I can’t see anything anyway because suddenly there are tears in my eyes. I give him back his binoculars. What rotten luck that he should be the one to find them.

  In the next room Julian comes to me and says: “We must go back.”

  I say: “I’m not going before I find something too.” He repeats that I must hurry, as if it were a question of skill whether I find something or not. He stays with me in each room, as long as I like. He opens every window and looks at everything with his damn binoculars.

  I feel I would be content with less and less, but there is nothing there. Julian says: “We must go. Or d’you want them to find out everything?” I say there is just one more room I want to go into, that’s where the cloth ball is lying under the bed, then we’ll run back to the camp. “All right,” says Julian; since the binoculars he’s a generous friend. While we walk along the street I have no answer to the question of what will happen if my house, of all the houses, should happen to be locked. Julian sees it long before I do, through his contraption, and says: “The door’s open.” There is no ball under the bed. I crawl into every corner. When we left the room it was here, no doubt about that, so someone came later and stole the ball. Now the whole thing hasn’t been worth it.

  Julian asks: “What’s wrong?” because I am sitting on the bed crying. He puts his hand on my shoulder, though he could easily be grinning. He’s a pretty good friend. Now he should ask whether I want his binoculars; of course I wouldn’t accept them, but it would help a lot. Then I remember Father’s flashlight. It hasn’t shown up in the camp so far; maybe it’ll show up here, if the cloth-ball thief hasn’t found it. I don’t know where Father kept it hidden. I don’t think it had any fixed place; sometimes it lay on the table, sometimes somewhere else.

  I get up and ask Julian: “If you had a flashlight as big as your fist, where would you hide it?”

  He looks around three times, then asks: “Are you sure it’s here?”

  I say: “It must be here.”

  Julian puts down his binoculars on our table and begins to search; I like that but then again I don’t like it. I hurriedly start searching; I must find the flashlight before he does. There are a few places I know that he doesn’t—a hole in the floor, a little hollow under the windowsill, a loose board in the top of the wardrobe. My knowledge yields me nothing. I crawl on my stomach across the room, I climb on the chair: no flashlight. If Julian says once more that we have to leave, we’ll have to leave. For the last time I crawl under the bed, and I hear him say: “D’you mean this one?” He is quite calm. He has placed the flashlight on the table without waiting for any thanks.

  I ask: “Where did you find it?”

  He says: “In the drawer.” He says it like someone who can’t understand that I almost went out of my mind over such a ridiculous object. He takes his important binoculars and goes to the door. Perhaps I would never have thought of the drawer: you don’t need to crawl on your stomach to reach it; you don’t have to climb on a chair; not even the ball thief had that much sense.

  Back in the camp I’ll make the light shine; just now Julian is impatient. I hurry after him to the stairs, yet I’m the one who knows every step of the way here. “Thanks, Julian,” I say or think. Suddenly, I feel sorry for Itzek. Julian forbids me to try out my flashlight in the street. I do as he says. I pay no attention to where we’re going. I just follow him. I don’t feel cold yet. I have to hold the flashlight in my hand because of course, having forgotten my trousers, I don’t have pockets.

  I ask: “D’you remember the way?”

  “You can go by yourself if you like,” says Julian, which means he knows the way. I’ve no idea why he is angry. I want to be nice to him.

  I say: “If you need the flashlight, you can borrow it any time.”

  He says: “I don’t need your flashlight.” I believe he’s just as eager as I am to be home again—that puts him in a bad mood; he dreads facing the wall again just as much as I do and having to climb it and jump down into the depths.

  I say: “If the Germans are all asleep, we don’t need to climb. Why don’t we simply walk through the gate?”

  “Because it’s locked, stupid,” says Julian.

  It gets colder as we walk along. Of course, Julian finds the camp and since I’ve never doubted it I feel no relief. He even finds our spot. He whispers: “Oh no, d’you know what’s wrong?”

  I whisper: “What?”

  “The iron struts,” he whispers back, “there aren’t any on this side.”

  I’d like to have had a bright idea too and whisper: “We have to go around the camp, somewhere there must be these things.”

  “But there’s glass all along the top of the wall, except at this place,” whispers Julian.

  I look at my hands, which I had forgotten, and my knee. I whisper: “If we find another place, we’ll take a stone and first break up the glass.” I realize how good my idea is, for now Julian says nothing and looks for a stone. He puts the stone in his trouser pock
et and sets off as leader; if we should find struts on this side of the wall, it’ll be me who has saved us.

  While walking ahead Julian says: “Stop playing with your stupid flashlight or I’ll take it away from you.” He’s always bossiest when he’s right; I would be a better leader if I were the leader. We have to make a detour, a big detour away from the wall and past the camp entrance, where there’s not a soul to be seen. That’s how Julian wants it. He takes away my flashlight, though I’ve done nothing with it. For safety’s sake, I don’t resist; a leader must think of everything and needn’t explain everything. We sneak across the street, which leads straight back to the camp gate. There’s still no one there to see us. We get back to the wall. Julian returns my flashlight, which is what I expected. We walk and walk and find no struts.

  I say: “Julian, there won’t be any.”

  “I know that perfectly well,” he says, but keeps walking.

  Then I ask: “How much longer are we going to walk?” His answer is to stop, sit down, and lean his back against the wall. I sit down too and don’t ask. I look at Julian and see something terrible: he is crying. Now for the first time we’re stuck. He is crying because he’s at his wits’ end. His crying before, when he jumped down from the wall and fell, was nothing in comparison. We huddle together, most likely he feels just as cold as I do. He’s probably a few months older.

  I ask: “Shall we go into an empty house and lie down?”

  He answers: “Are you crazy?” A few times my eyelids close. I think what a pity it is that it wasn’t Julian who had the idea about the empty house. By now it’s so light that my flashlight makes hardly more than a bright circle on the ground. I think of Father, wanting him to come and fetch us, first me, then Julian, or both together, one under each arm. I want him to lay me down on the bed and cover me up warmly: oh my, that would be good. He’d have to hold my Mother’s hand. Both would have to stand beside the bed, looking down on me and smiling until I woke up.

  Then something hurt. Before us stands a huge German. He has prodded me with his foot. He does it again, but not like someone meaning to kick. Out of his terrible eyes he utters a few words that are unintelligible; I’m too scared to try even to get up. Disaster won’t really strike until I’m standing; I stay sitting down. But beside me Julian is on his feet, held up by his collar. The giant says in funny Polish: “What are you doing here?” I look at my friend; the giant shakes me a little.

  Julian points at the wall and says: “We’re from the camp.” That makes me admire him for a long time—the calm way he says it. The giant asks: “And how did you get out?” Julian tells him the truth; meanwhile I look at the helmet and the rifle sticking up over the giant shoulder, the giant shoe on my stomach, pinning me down. I’m convinced we’re soon going to be shot—we realized that from the beginning. The giant asks why the hell we didn’t go back into our camp. Julian explains that too. He has never been as great a hero as now. The giant looks up to the top of the wall and seems to understand. He takes his foot away from my stomach—that’s like an order to get up—and hardly am I on my feet when he grabs me by the collar. The flashlight is still lying on the ground. I have to get hold of it somehow before we leave.

  The giant lets go of both of us and says: “Come with me to the guardhouse.” But he just stands there without moving. So do we, of course—it’s up to him to take the lead. “Come along, get a move on now,” he says, giving us a shove. I turn toward the wall and pick up my flashlight—it’s my last chance. The giant asks: “What’ve you got there?” and grabs my hands, which are behind my back. He sees the flashlight, takes it, tries it out, and puts it away in his pocket as if everything here belonged to him. Every bad thing I have ever heard about the Germans is suddenly true. I hate him like poison. If it had been anyone else I would have tried to persuade him to give me back the flashlight, even if it had meant an argument, even with Father. With this huge German it was hopeless. I see Julian stuff his shirt well down into his trousers. Only the two of us know what he is hiding under his shirt. I hope for his sake that he can hang onto his binoculars—I don’t want the giant to have them. The giant says: “Get a move on now.” He gives us another shove. We walk along in front of him. I notice Julian moving his booty from his back to his stomach. If we’re going to be shot, I think, his binoculars won’t be much use to him anyway. The giant tells us to stop.

  With his giant hands he turns us around to face him. He looks at us for a long time, like a person with something on his mind—I wish him the worst worries in the world.

  He says: “Do you know what’ll happen to me if I don’t take you to the guardhouse?” As if that concerned us: he’s not only a thief, he’s also an idiot. I think: Whatever happens to you, it can’t be nearly bad enough.

  Julian says: “No, I don’t.” I feel like answering that I don’t care—it would be a good answer—but I see his great fists dangling. Oh how I’d love to be a giant! Suddenly, he grabs us both by the neck and flings himself on the ground, bringing us down with him. He is still holding me by the neck as if it were made of wood. He says: “Not a word.” I see a light at the far end of the wall, a motorbike. Soon I can hear the sound of it; I seem to hear the giant’s heart beating too; by now the pounding of his heart is louder than the sound of the motorbike. He says: “Not a word,” though he’s the only one talking. He’s a thief, a fool, a coward—I’m not scared of someone like that. I can’t see Julian because the huge body is lying between us. A long way off the motorbike turns a corner, but we have to stay where we are for a little while.

  “Get up,” the giant then says. He lets go of us and brushes off his soldier’s clothes. I look at my underpants and know I’ll be in plenty of trouble with my mother, if I ever get out of this alive. The giant takes off his helmet and wipes his forehead; like all Germans he has fair hair. He takes his time, as if the cold existed only for me and not for him. His helmet is back on his head; now he takes hold of his rifle. This must be it: take you away and shoot you. They can do that.

  Julian asks: “Are you going to shoot us now?”

  The giant says nothing, probably doesn’t consider Julian’s question worth answering. He looks up and down the street; no doubt he doesn’t want anyone to see what he is about to do to us. He says to Julian: “Don’t you dare try and run away,” and wags his finger at him. Why has he taken hold of his rifle if not to shoot us? But he leans it against the wall. I suppose he doesn’t know himself what he wants. The flashlight is a little bulge under his jacket. I should have simply left it lying beside the wall, then one day some lucky person would have found it. He points at me and says only: “You there,” and I have to go up to him. He says: “I’ll lift you kids up onto the wall. But jump down quickly and run as fast as you can to your huts. Don’t waste a second. Understand?” So that’s what it’s all about. I don’t know whether I feel relieved—in a moment I’ll have to jump again.

  “We have a place,” says Julian, “where there’s no glass on top. It’s not far from here.”

  The giant says: “There’s no glass all along here,” and lifts me up with no effort at all. I have no time to think about it; it hurts me because he’s holding me by my hips. He says: “Stand on my shoulders.” I lean against the wall and do as he tells me; I still can’t reach the top. He says: “Now stand on my head.” He holds me by my ankles; I pay him back a bit for the flashlight: I make myself heavy and don’t try to spare his head. The helmet is his salvation, without a helmet he’d have a surprise coming to him. He says: “Hurry up.” I stand on one leg—there’s not room on the helmet—now I can grab the top of the wall. He asks: “Can you hold on?” I cautiously lift my foot from his head and he moves away from under me. I hang there, and will never get onto the wall; it’s exactly how I hung there before, except that then I wanted to get down to the ground and not get to the top. I look down over my shoulder and see him pick up his rifle.

  That’s the ultimate shock. No one can imagine: to be hanging up there
in the air just for him to shoot me, after all those nice speeches. There’s nothing to hold me to the wall now; I let go. As the years pass, the fall gets longer and longer—no wall can be that high—then I am caught by the giant. It is as if I had never fallen. The giant puts his hand over my mouth before I can scream. He says: “What d’you think you’re doing?” He sets me on my feet, picks up his rifle from the ground, and props it against the wall again. Then he says: “Once more, quick now.” Again he lifts me up, already I feel a bit more at home on his shoulders. This time I leave his head in peace. The sight of Julian standing down below makes me feel envious: I’m fighting a life-and-death struggle. I fall and I’ll be shot or not shot, and he stands there looking on, calm as you please. And he’s even allowed to keep his binoculars. I’ll have to have a word with him about that later.

  Once again I grab the top of the wall. The giant lets go of one ankle, the other remains in his hand. He says to Julian: “Give me the rifle.” He presses the rifle butt against my behind and pushes me up. I can almost sit on it. With no effort I manage to get onto the wall. I lie on my stomach and can see how right he was—there’s not even the tiniest scrap of glass in sight; the glass is a mystery. I can look into our camp where it is still as silent and empty as at night, though it’s as light as day now. The giant calls from below: “Get down there!”

  I turn around on the wall, hang down on the other side, and fall until I can fall no further. I lie there crying. I am back again and have brought nothing with me but sore places. Julian is no longer of interest to me; in the future he’ll have to find others for his ideas. I stand up. My parents feel closer. Father will be glad I’m still alive, my Mother will cry when she sees me, then she’ll wash out my many wounds; I won’t be able to tell them the truth. My hands are bleeding again, my knees are bleeding, my elbow looks as if it has been dipped in dirt and blood. One consolation is that they’ll probably feel so sorry for me they’ll stroke me. I start walking. Tomorrow I’ll say to Julian: “So all Germans sleep at night, do they?”