People in the crowd nod that yes, they’d heard and read it too: Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s communist leader on a lectern in front of press and witnesses just a few months prior, announcing that there would be ‘no wall’ to divide the city. The two countries, well, that’s been another matter. The Iron Curtain has existed between the countries of East and West Germany since soon after World War Two, leaving Berlin as the only permeable membrane between the two. It’s hard to picture an entire metropolis as floating in the land-sea of East Germany, 160 kilometres adrift from the remainder of West Germany, but that’s how it is in the post-war world. For the Allies, West Berlin is an expensive but symbolic presence behind the Iron Curtain that they strive to keep buoyant with funds and troops. For East Germans, however, the city border acts as a portal to the West, a porous escape route for those desperate to flee communism, with hundreds of thousands using the gateway in recent years, draining the GDR of its most valuable workers.
But not now, it seems. Not here, and not today. Not anymore.
Jutta’s reverie is broken by Hugo, who appears at her side, tugging her sleeve.
‘Come on, we should go,’ he says. His long, lean face is flushed with excitement in chasing this, the biggest of stories, but also fear at what might lie ahead, for him and every other Berliner. His wiry body runs towards his bike, clearly impatient for Jutta to clamber on.
‘Where?’ she says. It’s virtually her first word since glimpsing the barbed wire and it feels odd rolling off her tongue.
‘Need to check if it reaches all the way down – circling.’ Hugo is talking in excited shorthand, but Jutta catches his meaning, and it chills her even more. Will there be more wire, at every checkpoint? If it engulfs the entire Western side, as she fears, reaching Karin will be near impossible. She pictures herself fighting her way across the sharp metal spikes, clawing at her clothes, catching on her skin until the pain forces her to stop and wrench the barbs from her torn flesh. And then what? Arriving bloodied and injured at the hospital where Karin already lies, incapable of engineering an escape for either of them.
‘I need to find a way across, to Karin,’ she shouts at Hugo as they speed north along West Berlin’s streets, filling up now as word spreads even among the sleeping. Bewildered, some are still in their nightclothes, pyjamas poking above hastily donned trousers and shirts. Quiet confusion reigns.
‘We’ll have to find an open checkpoint first,’ Hugo calls behind him.
It’s less calm, though equally disordered, when they stop briefly at the interchange on Bornholmer Strasse, one of only eight crossings now open, where crowds are beginning to find their voice.
‘This isn’t right,’ one man cries weakly. ‘This isn’t democracy!’
He’s right – because beyond the thin wire is communism, but perhaps he feels better for saying it. Another voice: ‘They’ve stopped the S-Bahn at Friedrichstrasse station, sending the trains back to the East.’ Someone else shouts that the underground U-Bahn is also blocked, signalling that the link – the rail loop circling the city – is broken. Breaking one chain, erecting another.
Hugo disappears into the crowd again, his microphone pitched awkwardly in front of him, like some medieval jouster. Jutta looks hard beyond the line of protesters and pinpoints a young East German border guard standing alongside the guard post. With one eye on the machine gun they all seem to be sporting, she weaves her way up to the wire, and his face shows surprise; no one else has dared venture so close, instead protesting from a distance and inching backwards as angry words are tossed and left to float in the air. Despite the wild look in his eye, he has the decency to dip his weapon as Jutta approaches.
‘Can I … can I get through?’ she asks.
His look of alarm intensifies. Why on earth would she want to cross? She’s on the free side, the enclave of Western symbolism. Why would she want to go into the East?
‘No,’ he says through his incredulity. ‘No one gets through. Not today. Not without a permit.’ Then, seeing her despair multiply, adds: ‘I’m sorry, Fräulein.’
‘But my sister, she’s in hospital on your side,’ Jutta pleads. ‘She’s a West Berliner’ – and for the first time she feels the full force of the distinction – ‘she’ll be allowed to come back, surely?’
‘I don’t know, Fräulein,’ he says. He resumes a detached air, eyes focused on the distance. Jutta thinks he looks fearful of any potential emotion; perhaps as long as old women or children don’t crumble, or weep on him, he can keep it together. Maybe he has a mother who is intensely proud of his place in the East German military, boasts to the women in their apartment block of his prowess as a guard. All the same, he looks to be praying: Please don’t cry, Fräulein. You can shout at me, berate me, and I will show you the butt of my gun, just please don’t cry.
But if she lingers, Jutta feels she might. She peels away, her face beginning to crack with distress as she turns. Hugo is nowhere to be found, though she needs him now, her tall slip of a cousin, to bury her head on his bony chest, on his clean white T-shirt, and share her despair. Karin, oh Karin, why on earth did you go there?
No one could have known, of course – about the wire that would become the Wall, or the unfortunate sequence of events leaving Karin in the East Berlin Charité hospital, with the red welt of a scar hovering where her angry, swollen appendix so recently was.
‘Karin, can’t you wait until tomorrow, then I’ll happily come with you?’ Jutta had said only the day before. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and both were keen to escape the heat of the family’s second-floor apartment: meet friends, sit outside in the park, or a café.
‘But I promised I’d meet these people – they’re big on the fashion scene,’ Karin protested. ‘If I can just get one of my designs noticed by them, then I might have a chance, break out of that dead-end job I’m in.’ They both knew Karin’s quiet, steely determination would win through in the end, but she was already impatient.
So Karin, an aspiring fashion designer, had scooped up her portfolio of drawings and gone to the art college bar in East Berlin alone, despite their mother’s insistence that she didn’t look well, and Karin’s secret confession to Jutta that she wasn’t ‘feeling that great either’. Jutta had heard her in the night, groaning in the lavatory with stomach pains. In the morning, she’d looked pale, though not in pain.
Jutta, meanwhile, spent the afternoon watching a French film in West Berlin with her best friend, Irma, returning home to find her mother in tears. ‘We’ve just had a call from the Charité,’ Ruth said. ‘Karin’s just out of theatre.’
‘Theatre? What on earth …?’
Having collapsed in the college bar, Karin had been taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital and operated on immediately – a previously grumbling, now perforated, appendix swiftly removed. As she slept in recovery, the nurses had searched through Karin’s belongings and found the number for the family home.
‘Let’s leave now,’ Jutta had told her mother. ‘We can be there in no time on the U-Bahn.’
‘There’s no point,’ Ruth replied. ‘They say she’s sleeping off the anaesthetic and will be drowsy all night. The doctor feels it will be more helpful tomorrow, when she’s awake.’
And now it is tomorrow. And Lord knows how wretched that doctor must be feeling, Jutta thinks. Because if it’s remained the world’s best-kept secret, if the politicians in West Berlin and beyond didn’t have an inkling of how kilometres upon kilometres of barbed wire were hidden and distributed across a vast city, then how would an average doctor know? But all that doesn’t change the simple fact that Jutta is on one side of the Berlin divide and her sister on the other. For now, imprisoned.
When Hugo finds her in the crowd, spiralling emotions have given way to practicality, and Jutta’s brain is split between determined routes to reach Karin and ways of telling their mother. The latter she dreads the most. Then Aunt Gerda – Hugo’s mother and Ruth’s older sister. Though not twins, their bond
as sisters is almost as tight as Jutta’s with Karin.
‘Hugo, I need to get back home,’ she says. ‘Mama will be getting up, if she’s not already awake. We didn’t leave a note.’
‘I left one,’ Hugo assures. ‘Just a brief scribble, but they’ll know we’re safe.’ Are we? Jutta thinks. With machine guns and barriers, unrest beginning to bubble like the innards of a peevish volcano.
He carries on, awash with adrenalin. ‘Besides, I’ve bumped into some contacts’ – he says the word with pride – ‘they’re British journalists with an office on the East side. It seems they can come and go across the border, and they’ll take a note to the Charité, to Karin.’ He looks both pleased and relieved. Living with the twins almost since they were born means the trio are more like siblings than cousins.
They skirt the crowd and push through to where a man and a woman are standing.
‘Jutta, this is Douglas and Sandra – they’re journalists with Reuters.’
She smiles out of politeness at a youngish, well-dressed couple who may live in the East but shop for clothes in the West, clearly.
‘Thank you for your offer,’ Jutta says. ‘We don’t know how else to reach Karin yet. A note will put her mind at rest for now.’
Jutta rifles in the small shoulder bag across her body and pulls out a notebook, turns Hugo’s body to lean on his back as she puts pen to paper. What to write? ‘Hello Karin, you might be imprisoned in the East, but we will get you out.’ No, of course not. Jutta scribbles a simple: ‘Darling K, I hope you are feeling better – Mama and I will visit as soon as we can. Be good and rest up or else! Ja-Ja.’ She swallows hard as she signs the name her sister has called her since they were tiny, Karin unable to pronounce ‘Jutta’ then. She rips the sheet from her notebook, folds it and addresses it to ‘Karin Voigt – patient’ in the hope it will reach her intact – and soon. Hugo darts away again, having spotted something newsworthy.
‘What do you think is happening?’ Jutta asks the reporters then. ‘What’s on the other side?’
‘Bewilderment, much like here,’ the woman says in German, her British accent clipping the words. ‘We’ve seen Soviet tanks, but thankfully they’re stationed well back from the border line.’
‘And will it become a Wall?’ Jutta voices the question that’s been on her, and everyone’s, mind since she first glimpsed the barricade, a mere hour ago.
The man and the woman look at each other, their lips thinned in unison. ‘Officially, the GDR isn’t calling it a Wall,’ the man says eventually. ‘To them it’s an “anti-fascist protection barrier”. But yes, all my sources so far tell me it’s here to stay.’ He sighs heavily, already lamenting a life gone. ‘It’s very likely to function as what we all know to be a Wall. And soon.’
His words send arrows through Jutta, enough to jolt her body from the exhaustion she’s beginning to feel. It’s just gone four a.m., still dark, and her body is signalling in no uncertain terms she should be in bed. Yet her mind won’t stop racing. Sleep is a long way off.
Hugo arrives back into their little fold, having broadcast into his station for a few minutes, via his portable radio.
‘Let’s see if we can find any more checkpoints – you never know, some might be open,’ Jutta urges her cousin. One is all we need to let us through, she thinks.
‘Good luck,’ the woman says, clutching the note for Karin. ‘We’ve not found one that’s fully open to anyone except press and diplomats, but you might try further south.’
Hugo pushes the tiny engine of his motorbike to capacity as they weave through the streets, harder to navigate now as more and more Berliners have woken to the noise outside and taken to the streets on foot, looking uniformly bemused – a hangover for the whole city. Jutta scans their faces as she and Hugo whizz by, the people hopelessly drawn towards the border points, not by any one person but by an invisible light almost, an irresistible beacon to their confusion.
The two journalists are right: every crossing is closed, and the border guards are unbending, despite Jutta’s pleas, even when she’s finally moved to tears. They stare resolutely ahead as she sobs. Wiping her tears, she can see the fear in some – mere boys on military service and not hard-and-fast devotees – but it is what they’ve been trained to do: to look as if they don’t care.
The sun begins to rise just before five as they reach the vast open scrub of Potsdamer Platz, where it meets Leipziger Strasse. There, the full force of the East’s meticulous organisation hits Hugo and Jutta squarely; they watch as civilian workmen wield jackhammers in a deafening dawn chorus, breaking the concrete and sinking heavy posts into the uneven ground, on which the thorny wire is then strung like fairy lights across the space.
‘They can’t do this, can they?’ one old woman asks of them. ‘We’re Berliners – we have a right to cross.’
‘Looks like we’re purely West Berliners now,’ the man next to her replies gravely. Pointing to a cluster of onlookers on the other side of the wire, he adds: ‘And they are East Berliners.’ The identity of East and West residents is years old, though the lines to date have been drawn in the sand between nations and never enforced. Now they are being pressed, with guns and hardware, into accepting it.
‘One of those is my daughter,’ the woman murmurs, and waves a white handkerchief into the rising light of the day. On the other side, a bright green scarf flutters in response. Hugo nods sympathetically while the old woman weeps her despair into his microphone. ‘Will I be able to see her, visit her?’
Jutta turns away then, because all she can see in her mind is a tiny, shrunken version of Karin, furiously waving, her voice getting smaller and smaller as the layers of wire thicken.
There’s plenty of conjecture, but no one seems to know anything for certain, least of all the smattering of West German guards who are now trying to keep the confusion from cultivating into outright dissent; if the West Berliners cannot reach the East’s guards to protest, they will surely turn on any authority. Though, still the guards seem conflicted: why are they protecting it when it isn’t even their barrier? It’s the opposing line of East German guards, with fixed expressions and fingers tight on their machine guns, which acts as the best motivation to keep order.
Hugo patches into his station again, while Jutta tunes into the crowd. She hears that no checkpoints are open to the south, and then mutterings that ‘things’ are happening on Bernauer Strasse. She’s desperate to turn tail for home, to seek comfort in her mother and aunt, but she is also hopelessly drawn to the gash that has been created across her city, pulled by the magnet that is Karin towards the divide. She knows too that Hugo needs to continue reporting: tragic though it is for Berlin, this is an important day for him and his work.
They head north again on the bike, through the large Tiergarten park but skirting the Brandenburg Gate, parking up a few streets away from Bernauer Strasse and following the sounds of unease. People are concentrated in the wide V-shape of the street, made by the tall terraced buildings of dark red brick, some seven storeys high, and which forms a boundary in itself; the border across Berlin has never been entirely straight, but meanders and zig-zags almost randomly from north to south, sometimes slicing through cemeteries and parks and even houses. Bernauer Strasse is one such place: the pavement in front of the terraces falls on the West side, in the Wedding district, while the fabric of the building and rear entrances are in the East’s Mitte district. The residents are East Berliners, though judging by the steady trickle of people appearing on the pavement in front, hauling their life’s belongings in hastily packed shopping bags, they plan on switching allegiance rapidly.
Hugo is soon swallowed by the wealth of human feeling to be captured by his tape recorder, and Jutta wanders towards where the buildings end and the wire begins, the cold metal spirals piled on one another. She looks intently at the mesh of barbs and thinks of the stories already circulating, of people hurdling the wire with bravado and dashing to freedom, their blood and flesh left on t
he barrier. Over the past hours, she’s heard more talk of its permanence, concrete blocks being amassed to be piled like children’s bricks and produce an ugly and uneven grey sore, in a city that’s already seen more than its fair share of wartime rubble.
Again, Jutta is thinking intently of Karin, of how she herself might possibly scale these blocks in reaching her sister, when a woman walks up beside her and calls out to someone on the other side of the grey mesh. Two older women turn sharply and run towards the obstacle, both faces a pained grimace. ‘Greta!’ one keens.
The younger woman promptly hoists a small child, no more than six months, forward into the air, so that its wriggling torso is just above the wire tangle. The baby’s legs cycle with delight as those on the other side coo at the child: ‘Hello Franz, hello gorgeous boy. Remember your grandmama; we’ll see you soon, my darling. We’ll see you soon …’ until an East German Vopo approaches and pulls them away, their voices tailing off in sobs, in the true knowledge that ‘soon’ won’t be any time near; bewilderment is slowly giving way to a feeling of misery at how enduring this is likely to be. Jutta’s eyes catch the young mother’s sideways glance and they trade looks of despair, and perhaps a vision of Berlin’s future.
The mother cradles baby Franz close, pushing her head into his chubby body and sobbing loudly, his round face peering over her shoulder, smiling his toothless grin at Jutta as if nothing in his tiny world has changed.
Unable to look, Jutta turns her gaze up to the bluest of August skies raining down on Berlin’s streets, and sees only grey.
Hugo is swamped with material and needs to go back to his office to refresh his equipment and make contact with his news desk. He knows he won’t get to bed any time soon, needing to feed off coffee and the city’s angst for hours yet. He’ll drop Jutta back home, he says, and check in by phone for news of Karin.
The Girl Behind the Wall Page 2
