‘Hey, what are you doing?’ she cries with alarm, instinctively jerking away from Jutta.
Same build, same walk, but it’s not Karin.
‘I’m so sorry, I thought you were …’ Jutta stammers.
The woman stands aghast, affronted, but still doesn’t move. She sees the distress of her would-be attacker and is either curious or blindsided.
‘… someone I knew,’ Jutta goes on, feeling tears butting up against her frustration. ‘I recognised my sister’s dress.’
The woman looks more confused than anything, until Jutta explains it’s an outfit her sister made by hand: her own design, a one-off.
‘I got it in that boutique near Wertheim’s,’ she pouts with irritation. ‘It is mine. I bought it.’
Of course, it’s the boutique where Karin worked, one of those designs she proudly placed on the peg to sell, with her own label hand-sewn into the collar: ‘Ka-Ja’. If it ever took off, they were going to be partners, with Jutta handling the business side of things, using her gift for languages in dealing with the ‘huge’ exports they would inevitably have. Karin always emphasised the ‘huge’ part, beaming widely at the dream. The sudden, startling memory shifts the tears to just under Jutta’s lids, barely contained, and the woman moves awkwardly away. Jutta stands in the busy thoroughfare of colourful Berlin, solitary in a sea of bodies, with only the faint tweak of the bond between the sisters as twins for comfort. As days blur into months and months into years, the thread appears thinner, sometimes a mere filament as their time apart goes on. But it’s still there. She won’t let that go. And she’s certain Karin won’t either.
As for the Wall, while families continue to fracture, it only gains strength, fortified by metal and materials, driven by the GDR’s determination to corral their precious workforce and repel the contagion of capitalism, punctuated with watchtowers and armed guards, whose view is improved by powerful searchlights, ready to set loose the highly trained dogs on any escapees. And like so many incursions on Berlin in the past – swastikas, Stormtroopers and bombs – it becomes strangely normal after a time. Jutta often stands and watches her fellow Berliners walk by without a second glance, skirting the barrier as if it’s always been there. The tourists come and go, they look and peer over the Wall to another land, at people who squint their eyes back at the West. They comment on the atrocity and they go away again. But still there are no bulldozers, no widespread will to tear it down. The Wall endures.
PART TWO
20
The President Comes to Town
26th June 1963, West Berlin
Another day, another year. Another president. If Berlin had managed a show of adulation for the vice-president of the USA, they go all out for the head man himself. John isn’t the first Kennedy to visit Berlin; the year before brothers Robert and Edward had stood on a platform and stared over the divide, with ‘Teddy’ Kennedy venturing into the East and marvelling at a line of shoppers and the shortage of apples to buy. But John F. is the darling – the one whose presence matters – lending far more kudos than the British Prime Minister Macmillan or French leader De Gaulle, both of whom have made a point of staying away. Berlin isn’t forgotten if JFK comes to town.
Jutta is here again on the square facing Schöneberg town hall, compressed within an even bigger crowd than for the last American dignitary, losing Hugo to the swell of bodies almost as soon as they arrive. For a few moments, she tracks his microphone, taped to a broom handle pilfered from the apartment and which now bobs above the crowd. But it’s soon swallowed and she’s alone again in the sea of expectant, upturned faces.
Early news reports suggest almost three-quarters of West Berlin’s two million residents have turned out to welcome America’s golden boy on his whistle-stop tour – at the airport, on the tickertape motorcade that inched down the main avenues, at Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate, its columns still resolutely behind the Wall. But judging by the crush, Jutta thinks most of them are here on Rudolph Wilde Platz. There are people squashed into every surrounding window and balcony, the flat, grey apartment blocks dripping colourful flags, so that if you pivot full circle the sight is that of an overdressed Christmas tree. Only it’s eighty degrees in what little shade there is.
She catches traces of body sweat in her nostrils, the dedication of some who camped overnight to gain the best spot. For almost an hour the excitement ebbs – Chinese whispers of his arrival making heads crane upwards towards the large platform where he will speak in front of a bank of microphones – and recedes, settling and simmering with an occasional waft of breeze. By the time the platform begins to fill with dignitaries, Mayor Willy Brandt among them, the atmosphere is electric. Deafening chants of ‘J-F-K, J-F-K …’ fill the air, loud enough that the echoes are carried across the city and over the concrete – the GDR not yet able to build a Wall dense enough to deflect the noise of determined adulation.
Then the riotous cheer to signal his actual presence. Standing on tiptoe, Jutta can just about see the man they have invested so much faith in. Has she that belief? In quieter moments, no, though she feels herself swept along by the day’s zeitgeist and his undeniable charisma; he’s all hair, looking down with his big, white smile. Berliners need this. They need him.
Finally, finally, the crowd quietens enough for him to speak. His words are all about freedom, of course, and divisions between the free and communist world; there are those who say we can work with communism, he suggests, making eye contact with the huge assembly and pausing briefly as only a statesman and speechmaker can. ‘Let them come to Berlin,’ he asserts firmly. The people go wild, whistling and waving furiously, and some of the elders in the audience can’t help but notice an uncomfortable quiver zip through them; they recall the last man to attract such frenzied worship on these streets. It didn’t turn out so well for Berlin, Germany or the world then.
But for Jutta, who has only scant memories of the Führer and war, there’s something else that inflates a large ball in her throat, pushing her tears up and out onto her hot cheeks as JFK reminds everyone of what the Wall has done to the people in its shadow, in ‘dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters’. Not that she – or anyone – needs reminding, but when it’s said by arguably the most influential president of the free world to date, it hits home. And hard. She feels winded, could easily sag towards the floor if it weren’t for the tight knit of bodies she’s sandwiched between. Her sniffs and sobs are swallowed back by the noise.
Buoyed by his own wave of fervour, JFK saves the best until last. Leaning hard on the lectern, full hair blowing in a timely breeze, he unleashes his master stroke: ‘Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner,’ he pronounces.
The entire square erupts, a thousand flashbulbs popping and press men frantically scribbling JFK’s gift of a quote, as if they already know it will go straight from their notebooks into the annals of history. Amid the deafening chant of ‘Ken-Ne-Dy! Ken-Ne-Dy!’, grown men are weeping next to Jutta, so entranced that they instantly forgive his awkward pronunciation. And all she can think is: Karin would love this. She would be the one cheering, waving a banner, pulling her sister through the crowds towards the front and swaying with the applauding acolytes. Can Karin hear this? Doubtless even the East German politicians are unable to close their ears to this tidal wave of sound. Earlier, Jutta had heard rumours of the East Germans erecting hoardings near the place where Kennedy went to observe the Wall, so that the GDR’s citizens could not see the man they may or may not glimpse on television. But surely, Karin knows it, hears it, senses it; no barrier can corral enthusiasm, passion and the sheer tumult of liberty. Not forever. Can it?
21
The Noise of Freedom
26th June 1963, East Berlin
Karin pushes her head down, engaged in her task, but the noise bleeds into her brain. You can’t help hearing it – there’s nothing distinctive, and no words to hook onto, only a resonant beat to the hum of
noise from the direction of the Wall, almost a thumping. A rhythmic incantation of adoration.
She knows all too well what it is, although they aren’t supposed to, as state television refuses to acknowledge the visit of a serving United States president only a few miles away. But anyone brave enough to have a radio tuned into the West Berlin RIAS station hears the detail. Through the window one floor below, workers are clustered at the back entrance of the boiler room – she can just glimpse them shielded by the huge, metal refuse bins, muffling the noise of a tiny transistor held in someone’s hand. No one has sparked up a cigarette, as they usually do in their breaks, so as not to send smoke signals and be caught by one of the managers. Not today, of all days, and not with a radio in their midst. Part of Karin wants to go and join the group, but for the other part – the bigger portion – it’s too painful. She knows for certain two of the people she most loves in the world will be there; in days of old Jutta, Hugo and she would have gone together, as they did to any major gathering or rally. She would have been the one to urge them to go, spinning wildly in the sunshine, almost drunk on the atmosphere, on the prospect of people making change. In her world. Her Berlin.
She’s certain too, that while Jutta is there in the square heaving with people, she will be thinking of the two of them together, as sisters and best friends. And Jutta will be sad. For her part, Karin has harboured an odd sensation throughout the day, something tweaking inside her, pulling, but she can’t explain what or how it makes her feel, only that it unnerves her. And makes her sad, too.
In that moment, the sunshine and the day’s heat combine to cause irritation too. She’s especially fretful. She pushes back the fringe of her hair with annoyance, her skin prickly with sweat underneath, and sets to her task again.
Why can’t they make contact? After the initial lockdown, every avenue was closed, every method the hospital tried capped off. It was the same for everyone then – hundreds of families prised apart in one night by that rapidly growing beanstalk of the Wall. Now, almost two years on, there is a stuttering passage of post from East to West. She understands that Jutta and Mama may not know where she is, but why is there no reply to the scores of letters she’s sent home? Everyone knows each envelope is steamed open and screened in the bowels of some government building, but there’s nothing in what she writes that the Stasi could possibly object to – they are merely ‘How are you? I’m fine, don’t worry’ messages. Once a flow of letters is established, Karin is sure they can branch out with some form of code, confident Jutta would catch on very quickly. Because she has so much to tell them.
Karin hears it again as she works, that thrum from the side of the city where the day always seems to set in an amber glow, as if the entire land over the Wall is bathed in a magical radiance. She sometimes watches the fervent Easterners, the true communists and believers, scoffing at the golden hue, as if nature itself is conspiring to create capitalist propaganda, that the streets are paved with gold. ‘They’ll see one day,’ she heard one old man mutter in the shopping queue. ‘It might look like a honeybee haven, but really it’s a wasps’ nest waiting to turn. Better here – at least we don’t have to fight for our bread.’
‘I like not having to fight,’ the woman next to him had countered, ‘but do we really have to queue so long for it?’
And that glow from across the Wall, to Karin it’s still alluring, despite everything that’s happened, her survival since the operation, her life now with Otto. She’s grateful, maybe even happy at times, but to her the West holds its halo aloft and she remains hopelessly enticed. It’s where her heart – or at least a portion of it – rests: in Mama, Gerda, Hugo and, of course, Jutta. The other portion? Well, that’s more complicated.
22
A Chip in the Concrete
26th June 1963, West Berlin
The square takes an age to empty; clusters of people linger long after the star has left the podium, not wanting to allow their joy and enthusiasm to dissipate, needing to hold on tight to that feeling of being centre stage and not forgotten.
Jutta feels the opposite: she wants to be alone with her thoughts. Besides, there’s no hope of finding Hugo now, even as the crowds seep away. She finds herself walking east, pulled by something inexplicable, yet which feels strangely like a magnet, encouraged on her way by an occasional warm wind that blusters along the street, sending flecks of abandoned rice, flour and tickertape flurrying like a summer snowstorm.
Oddly, Jutta finds herself being reeled in, having avoided the Wall for the past year or more. In the first six months after Karin was … she wants to say ‘captured’, but it feels more like ‘incarcerated’, she was there all the time, hating the sight of its presence yet hopelessly drawn. She spent hours staring through the wire in segments not yet fortified, or hovering on a nearby balcony of a friend, in the hopes of catching just a glimpse of Karin, their strand surely strong enough that her sister would know to come. Each time, disappointment. Was Karin even looking towards the Wall? Jutta realised it was becoming something of an obsession when the same border guards recognised her pleading face, shaking their heads with pity and a little humour: ‘Here again, Fräulein? We’ll have to give you a special spot in the queue.’
She shared the gnawing hunger with no one and it came, eventually, to eat away at her. Even Herr Fleisch moved on to a different department. Postal services between the two sides of the Wall were slowly and haphazardly reinstated, but there was never any reply to the hopeful letters she addressed to Karin via the Charité, alongside the mystery of why Karin didn’t send any letters of her own to the apartment. Even now, a black and seemingly infinite void remains. Jutta determines their sibling strand will endure, that the fibres cannot snap, but equally it’s been weakened with too much pushing and pulling.
Once or twice, she almost gained enough courage to approach the fluchthelfers at the university for help in finding Karin, but she knows that help doesn’t come free. The group’s unappointed leader, Axel, had been holding court at the table with growing confidence and Jutta found hers shrinking. For her own sake, she decided to let go a little. And so, her trips to the Wall ceased, and she concentrated instead on keeping hope alive.
Now, the occasion and the swell of human faith – perhaps even JFK himself – is propelling Jutta once again towards the rough breeze-block divide, though to what purpose she doesn’t know. To stare at its ugliness? As she walks amid a city still settling from the day’s events, she convinces herself this will be one last time. She has to get on with life; she has to live. Karin would want that. Does want that.
It takes her some time to effectively cross the city on foot, skirting the top end of Tempelhof airport, but she’s always loved walking and it doesn’t seem tiring.
There it is: the spiky crest of the barricade comes into view at the top of Harzer Strasse, one of those residential streets almost bisected like the ill-fated Bernauer Strasse, but not quite. Here, the square apartment blocks hug rather than sit on directly on the Wall, with only a pavement between the front doors and the grey, pitted concrete, so that windows above the first floor look out directly onto the wire and the vista of the death strip. They could even wave at the border guards at a nearby watchtower if they so wished. Only they don’t, of course; the Wall is an unwelcome intruder and the stares over the space remain sombre.
Jutta stands, walks a few yards and stops again, unsure of what she feels. Not the same magnetism as in those early months, to be near it, as if it meant she was closer to Karin. It’s more of an overwhelming sadness that she can’t share this day with her sister. That they’re not allowed. And all because of this stupid war between halves of the same country, in what the wider public see not as deep differences in political ethos, but as a petty quarrel between infantile men. It makes her think back to the rows she and Karin had as children. They shared everything, but sisters inevitably fight, giving rise to ridiculous squabbles, name-calling, vicious words being traded and even, on one occasion,
clumps of Jutta’s hair being pulled out, to their mother’s utter horror. But their rancour never lasted (even after the hair episode) and it wasn’t long before they were apologising and snuggling up in one bed, arms curled around each other. That’s the life of a twin. Just occasionally you can’t live with them, but mostly it’s the opposite.
What they never, ever did – even during the fiercest of battles – was build a wall between themselves. That would have been going too far.
Drawn ever closer to the Wall, Jutta turns the corner towards an area of abandoned buildings, their windows bricked up. Like many of the dwellings where the Wall simply ploughed through indiscriminately, they are waiting to be demolished, to make way for more transparency across the space and better vision for the Wall guards. A small clump of what look to be garages attached to a solitary, two-storey house sits in the turn of the Wall, no doubt destined for the same fate as the terraces of Bernauer Strasse – a date with the bulldozer. But for now, the red bricks adorned in razor wire form the west side of the barricade.
A few yards on from the scatter of buildings, Jutta inches towards a peephole that’s been gouged into the crumbly mortar between bricks. Glancing up to the tip of the watchtower to make sure the guards can’t see her, she bends down and puts her eye to the tiny hole, which has been bored into the concrete at child height, small enough not to be detected from the other side. There’s nothing but grey in her sights, a small slit next to a ground-level building, a sliver of East Berlin that perhaps relatives might stand in and be seen. But that’s all they can do – be seen. No contact, nothing worthwhile.
Jutta turns tail, intent now on taking her unsatisfied curiosity back home, though her steps are heavy and slow. It’s a part of the city she’s been to only once or twice in her life, and so she can’t make the comparison of how it was before. She tries to imagine who lived in the red-brick house pierced by the Wall – the garage owners perhaps? Maybe once it was a thriving business, until it simply got in the way of GDR progress. She stops alongside the wire, which closely wraps the brickwork like a Christmas parcel, just thinking – daydreaming almost – when she hears a sound: a faint but high-pitched mewling. She casts about for a cat, her heart lurching with the horror of it being caught on the wire and having to disentangle the animal, painfully, and tend to its bloody fur. But it seems to be coming from inside, and the only ‘inside’ in this mini-wasteland are these buildings.
The Girl Behind the Wall Page 9
