The Girl Behind the Wall

by Mandy Robotham

  ‘No, thanks,’ Jutta says as he offers her the cigarette; she rarely smokes and feels it won’t help the sediment of nausea lodged in her stomach. ‘Do you feel human again?’

  ‘Well, I slept, if that’s what you mean,’ Hugo replies. ‘I’m not sure about the human element.’ He smiles weakly, takes another puff.

  ‘So, what is the word out there? About what it means for the future?’ Despite that initial tour with Hugo, Jutta feels as if she’s been in a glass bubble over the past thirty-six hours, solely focused on Karin. With Hugo’s position as a reporter and his degree in politics, she trusts his scrutiny of the facts.

  Her cousin blows out his cheeks this time, no smoke necessary for the impact. ‘It’s bad – our contacts say the Allies are running about like headless chickens, forming some sort of verbal protest, which pretends they mean business when they’ve got no intention of fighting it. They won’t give up West Berlin, but equally they won’t insist on the Wall coming down. It’s here to stay, Jutta.’

  They both regret losing a portion of the city for varying reasons – the theatres that offer communist-subsidised tickets, and the bars with cheap beer and good vodka, sometimes with atrocious bands but vibrant company. More, though, it’s the loss of freedom for others – friends and good people in the East who don’t deserve to be confined – and the sheer barbarity of herding one half of a city into a space and barring the other from entering.

  Jutta shifts uncomfortably. ‘What do you think it means for Karin?’

  Hugo shrugs, seems genuinely perplexed. ‘I think that it’s likely to change day by day,’ he sighs. ‘And whether or not she’s fit enough to come across on a good day.’ In truth, neither knows for sure whether she is alive, critically ill or recovering, but they need to imagine her crossing – to picture the reality of it – for everyone’s sakes.

  ‘Can we get another note to her via your press friends, that couple we spoke to?’ she asks.

  ‘I can try,’ Hugo says, but there’s scant hope in his voice. ‘They live just over the border in the East, but right now, with the phones and the telex down, they might as well be in Timbuktu. The West Berlin journos are banned from crossing so I have to rely on bumping into them if they come over the border. But I’ve asked all my colleagues to keep an eye out.’

  Jutta sinks into her chair and lays her head back against the old, striped fabric. The sun is dropping low over one side of the city, casting a golden glow across the now smaller island of West Berlin and its mixture of old and grey and vibrant, new architecture, as if it’s some sort of utopia blessed by good fortune. Which, of course, it is to some. By stark contrast, the East appears cast in a gloomy shadow, the light sucked free from its very fabric; anyone looking at the image on such a day would need reminding the sight is simply the result of the sun and earth’s daily cycle, and not Mother Nature’s disdainful comment on global politics.

  Jutta peers hard across the landscape in the direction of the Charité, beyond the blanket green of the park and the crowning statues of the Brandenburg Gate that she can’t quite see, but imagines in her mind. Beneath it, the Wall gets higher and more solid by the hour. Beyond that, there’s Karin.

  She closes her eyes against the glare, sees orange burning the inside of her lids. Hang on, Karin. Hang on. She can only sense that their unique thread has neither snapped nor unravelled, but it’s all she has.

  Life in Berlin grinds on in the next days, like some mythical two-headed monster hauled in opposite directions, each head pushing and pulling against the other, the machinery of politics grating behind the sorrow of families still reeling from their lifelines being severed. Jutta stands on a street corner, watching on dejectedly as the wire is replaced by the true Wall: labourers on the East side piling concrete blocks higher and higher, the cement between oozing out like icing on a cake and forming a crooked, undulating line of ugly grey. As it rises, the faces of the people on either side, their distressed expressions set like the stone of the Wall, disappear.

  In the Voigt–Zelle household, Ruth has gone from distressed to almost numb, and even Gerda can barely persuade her out of a silent melancholy as she thumbs for hours through photograph albums of the twins together. Jutta feels desperate to comfort her mother, yet she’s acutely aware the mere sight of her prompts Mama’s sorrow to heighten further, in repeated waves. She spends as much time away from the apartment as possible, stalking checkpoints up and down the Wall, trying her luck at access to the East wherever she hears a good number of West Berliners have been allocated passes. She doesn’t imagine how she might get back if she manages to cross – the only goal is to reach Karin and see that her sister is alive.

  Each time it’s the same: if she does make it to the checkpoint windows, the border guards narrow their eyes and scrutinise her identity card, then her, before moving languidly to a list beside them. She sees their eyes crawl up and down the paper. Always her lungs hold both air and fear. Repeatedly, the guard comes back to the window with a shake of the head and occasionally a sympathetic expression. ‘No, Fräulein – you cannot gain access.’

  Her pleas for an explanation are never answered. Why would her name be on a list? She’s never been in trouble, or part of any demonstration that would mark her out as a dangerous dissident: a threat to the GDR. She’s in the East far less than Karin, as most of her friends live in West Berlin. So why? Jutta can only walk wearily away and hope to try again, chance upon a slapdash guard who might not check so thoroughly. But does such a person exist in the GDR, where it seems unlikely anyone would dare to be either careless or sloppy?

  On Wall day plus three, Jutta is at work in the library office when she’s called to the front desk of her department. She imagines the young man facing her to be a student until he asks who she is and promptly hands over a small envelope, then turns tail and disappears before she has a chance to question him.

  The address is very specific and typed on a brown envelope; it looks official, although there’s no stamp. Inside, Jutta unfolds a small sheet of notepaper, and her heart plummets on seeing the Charité heading – is this THE letter? The notification that her beloved sister is dead? Oh God no. Please no.

  Fingers shaking, she scans the typed words at lightning speed for tell-tale phrases: ‘I’m sorry …’, ‘I regret to inform …’. Instead, there’s a polite tone and brief message to say Karin is recovering well, and may be ready to leave the hospital in two days. ‘We will endeavour to make sure she reaches home using the appropriate channels’, the short note ends. There’s no signature, or name, but Jutta knows in an instant that it’s genuine; at the bottom right-hand corner is a tiny doodle of two stick figures, each with a crude triangle to denote a simple dress. It’s Karin’s own sign-off, a signature for her sister. It’s them as a pair, little stick hands entwined. Their thread in ink.

  Inevitably, relief mixes with confusion. Who sent it? And why not an official letter to Karin’s home address? Despite the official notepaper, the anonymity and the delivery must mean someone is helping Karin. Jutta is flooded with gratitude, anxiety chasing at its rear: if the letter has to be so covert, does it follow that her sister’s release will need to be equally underhand?

  Jutta leaves work in the early afternoon, clutching the letter. She’s torn about showing it to her mother, giving her a rush of hope that may never be realised. Hugo needs to see it first, and one other still before him.

  At Schöneberg town hall, Hans Fleisch remains fraught and besieged, the pile of papers on his desk now a good deal higher. Still, he recognises Jutta, manages a smile for her and examines the letter.

  ‘Your sister may well have a guardian angel in the East,’ he says at last.

  ‘So, do we just wait – until they contact us, or me?’ she says.

  ‘I think so,’ Herr Fleisch says, rummaging in a smaller pile of correspondence to his side. ‘I was just about to contact you myself. This came back.’

  She recognises the well-handled form he tenders, her wr
itten request for passage across the border under the heading of ‘Family emergency’. What’s new are the large letters stamped in red, skewed at an angle: ‘REFUSED’.

  Jutta’s eyes are wide, her mouth paralysed, leaving Herr Fleisch to fill the void. ‘It came back today – much more swiftly than I would have imagined,’ he says.

  ‘But … but why? Is there any explanation?’ she stutters. ‘Does this mean just now, or forever?’ Even saying the word sticks in her throat.

  The look of genuine pity from Herr Fleisch alarms Jutta the most. It tells her nothing can be done, that fighting is futile. And it can mean only one thing.

  ‘Is this the Stasi’s doing?’ she dares to suggest.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure, but maybe,’ he ventures. ‘Everything about it suggests so. I’m sorry.’

  Jutta imagines the possible reasons behind a stark refusal from the Stasi. Ruth and Gerda could never be a fly in the communist ointment, or Karin, aside from her arty friends. And she herself works as a simple library assistant. It’s possible Hugo is a target for surveillance, as a Western journalist. Or could it be Oskar? Despite living with him almost all her life, her uncle’s occupation remains a mystery to Jutta, although she knows that he often crosses the border for ‘business’. Correction: he did cross the border.

  There’s little sense in analysing; if Herr Fleisch is right, there’s nothing they can do, with no pathway to appeal on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. The word is simply not in the Stasi vocabulary.

  Wandering home with a heavy despondency, Jutta passes newsstands that relay the hysteria, the daily Bild and Morgenpost papers shouting the Allies’ betrayal in bold headlines: ‘The West is doing nothing!’ The global press has woken up too; the well-timed snap of an East German border guard vaulting the wire instantly becomes a worldwide image of freedom, with numerous black and white images of weeping women reaching across the wire to their loved ones. The citadel of West Berlin, with its two million residents, has become a symbol for liberty, as statesmen scrap over the definition of democracy.

  Except Jutta doesn’t care what the world thinks, least of all politicians, unless it helps Karin: the GDR may refuse her family access, but what could possibly be the point of preventing her sister from returning? Surely, it’s in the communists’ best interests to expel Westerners? Karin is the last person in the world to ever infect another human being with her personality, except in a positive way. But the world isn’t thinking straight right now, is it? As the Wall climbs higher, life as they know it comes crashing down.

  Jutta is two streets away from home and in a world of her own when she’s startled by Hugo’s voice above the popping of his motorcycle engine, drawing to the side of the kerb.

  ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ he cries over the hum. ‘Hop on – I’ve tracked down a contact to help us.’

  They drive to a café just off Motzstrasse, where it’s not the British couple waiting for them but a young man in his twenties, with neat, dark hair and a well-fitted brown suit, who wouldn’t look out of place on either side of the Wall.

  ‘This is Lucien,’ Hugo introduces. ‘He’s a French journalist – and as such, with his magical passport, he’s got the run of the city.’

  Lucien nods and smiles, draws hard on his fragrant French cigarette and gestures for them to sit down. ‘I can take a message to your sister, but I won’t be able to wait for a reply,’ he tells them in a low voice. ‘I’m fairly sure all journalists have a Stasi tail the moment they go through the checkpoint.’

  Jutta doesn’t doubt what he says, not after today. ‘We appreciate anything you can do,’ she says to Lucien, though it burns inside that a foreign citizen has more right to enter parts of her city than her. Hugo talks work and politics while Jutta scribbles another note. She’s normally so articulate with a pen, always had the words while Karin commands the pictures, but now she can’t assemble anything worthy of her emotions. They’re stuck somewhere between her heart, her brain and the fingers of her writing hand.

  Karin – make no mistake, we’re here waiting for you. We would come at a moment’s notice if we could, Mama and me, Gerda too. Please get yourself well and come back soon. We all miss you madly and love you so much. Your home is waiting, Your Ja-Ja.

  She mimics Karin’s stick figure couple as best she can; it’s not a patch on the original, but Karin will recognise her pathetic attempt as genuine.

  Lucien leaves and she and Hugo stay on for a beer, her cousin feeding the jukebox while Jutta calls home with news of the letter, that Karin is alive and recovering. She hears the prayers and tears of her mother in the background, glad that Gerda is there to share in the relief.

  ‘What if she simply isn’t allowed back?’ Jutta voices her fears to Hugo, above the familiar backdrop of Elvis.

  ‘There will be ways and means,’ he says, though not with any relish. ‘But it might take some time.’ Already, he’s heard of groups mobilising, students mostly, to help people to traverse the Wall in every way possible, over, under or around. The true rate of early escape attempts, successful or not, isn’t known outside the GDR, but the Western press is keen to highlight those who have made it, including the nine border guards who’ve chosen to defect rather than enforce the Wall. Hugo tells her that a good number of escapees have also made it through the forest and greenery on the western border line between West Berlin and the East German countryside – it has a line of wire and is patrolled, but the sheer length makes it harder to police. For now.

  ‘Do you think it might come to that?’ Jutta says. Her eyes, neatly rimmed with black kohl, reflect horror. ‘I mean, a real escape for Karin?’ She’s not let herself think that far ahead yet.

  Hugo shrugs. He won’t admit as much to his mother or hers, but it seems that nothing would surprise him about the determination of the GDR to tighten the noose around its people, or anyone else in its reach.

  Jutta and Hugo linger a while longer before they ride back to Schöneberg and the town hall, not to see Herr Fleisch this time but West Berlin’s self-styled protector, Willy Brandt, high up on a podium, addressing the people, who stand like sardines in the sun-baked square. Taking a defiant stance behind a bank of microphones, his thick hair swept back, the city’s charismatic mayor addresses a huge crowd in the West, and those on the other side of the Wall ‘who can no longer speak out or come to us’. Fist aloft, he talks of peace without capitulation, of a firm stance with no weakness, but in the end the speech smacks of his disappointment with the Allies, in doing virtually nothing to reverse the situation. He reveals the content of his forthright letter to President Kennedy, in a rallying cry: ‘Berlin expects more than words. Berlin expects political action!’

  The crowd of more than two hundred thousand explodes, cheering and whistling, caught in a wave of solidarity for all Berliners, chanting their defiance and a determination to fight this affront to freedom. And Jutta, pushed and jostled in the clammy sway of bodies, feels entirely alone again.

  12

  Trapped

  17th August 1961, East Berlin

  Propped up on pillows, Karin reads the note over and over, so close as to see the grain of the paper, smiling to herself. From the brief message, she determines that her family must have received her own note, and now know both where she is and that she’s no longer at ‘death’s door’. They will come and get her, that’s the main thing. Jutta promises it. And her sister won’t let her down, because she never has and never will.

  She knows a little of what’s happening beyond her curtains, thanks to the staff who ghost in and out. ‘People are having to bring stepladders out onto Potsdamer Platz so they can see over the Wall, it’s gotten so high now,’ one student nurse says, eyes wide with the transfer of news.

  The white, unsoiled hospital walls act like the soft-spun silk of a cocoon, though it’s not entirely immune to outside events; at intervals the overhead lights flicker and fizz, until the hospital generator coughs into life. On one such occasion, a
porter trudges by and quips: ‘Watch out, they must be working late again tonight.’ When Karin asks what he means, she’s alarmed to hear it’s the power of the Wall searchlights sucking the nation’s electricity supply. ‘The picture on my television goes small,’ he grumbles. ‘I can’t see a bloody thing.’ Day by day, it’s clear the Wall is going nowhere but up.

  Karin hears extra snippets from the loudspeakers attached to street poles and vans roaming the streets, pushing out the official GDR line: no travel permits for East Berliners to be issued until the conclusion of a peace treaty that absorbs West Berlin into the GDR, something everybody knows will never happen. Karin is reassured that as a West Berliner she is fortunately exempt, and needs only the permit that Dr Simms has promised to apply for.

  She slides a hand under the thin blanket and palms at her belly, fingering the rough, crinkled skin surrounding her scar now the dressing has been removed. It hurts, more so when she walks up and down the ward to the bathroom, not letting any of the nurses see her wince with the persistent jab of hot pokers inside. The more she walks, she reasons, the sooner they will let her home. The pain she will deal with later.

  She sees Dr Simms as he enters the ward and he seems to be making a beeline for her bed. She readies a smile – she likes Dr Simms especially for taking extra efforts to reassure her, when she has no family on hand.

  But he doesn’t match her smile, as he often does. Is it bad news? More test results? Oh please, no.

  ‘I’ve heard from my family,’ she says quickly, in the hope that good news might override any bad. ‘They’re waiting for me to come home.’

  He pulls up the chair next to her bed. He’s never done it before, always stood, straight as an arrow. Maybe he’s just tired, Karin thinks, though a sense of dread is beginning to settle like a layer of fog over the Spree.