The Girl Behind the Wall

by Mandy Robotham

  Jutta knows she will start at the Charité – it’s a tenuous link as it’s now nearly two years since Karin was a patient, but the only one she has. The hope is to find a sympathetic receptionist who will take pity on her embellished sob story and not question the holes in its truth. She’s thought again of approaching the Wall-jumpers on the university campus, as they have ways of faking Eastern ID cards. But that means revealing at least a portion of her plan, and prompting some suspicion about her access. And for now, the hole in the Wall is hers, and hers alone.

  At various points, just the thought of setting foot in the East makes Jutta’s heart pound. Equally, there are some things you have to leave to chance, she thinks. And luck. God knows the family is due some good fortune. Please let it be soon.

  Jutta sets off as if she’s heading for work, but lingers in a small café a street away from Harzer Strasse, gauging the flow of people in the area. She’s dressed down for the occasion, not because she presumes East Berliners exist in a uniform of grey, but to avoid standing out as a visitor from the West. She doesn’t want to be noticed at all. So, it’s a plain jersey T-shirt, and a skirt that she hopes doesn’t show up the grazing on her knees – no stockings as they will certainly snag as she crawls through holes and out of windows. Most importantly, shoes low enough that she can run.

  She checks her bag in the café for the small amount of East German Ostmarks that she’d found in pots and drawers in the apartment. Any visit to the East before the Wall had meant changing up the required amount of the virtually worthless currency in order to cross the border, but since no one in the family has needed it for two years, it’s lain discarded in varying pots, jam jars and drawers. Only Uncle Oskar had eyed Jutta curiously as she scrabbled in the sideboard for coins, muttering that she was looking for hairpins. Amid the pens and paperclips, she also found an old map of the complete city, which she pulled out and held close to her body, her back turned away from Oskar.

  At ten a.m. and in bright sunshine, Jutta saunters towards the Wall at Harzer Strasse and the secret opening. It’s relatively quiet, no children about and few shoppers on the streets. She smiles at one or two gossiping women as they pass, though her insides are roiling, flipping and grinding, and she swallows down the sour taste of angst in her mouth. She flattens herself against the bricks opposite again, sensing any human traffic nearby, and then – before she has time to think it over too deeply – leaps for the hole. The cabinet that she’d hastily replaced pushes away more easily, but she can’t be sure if anyone has glimpsed her rear disappearing into what must appear to be a mysterious rabbit hole.

  Inside, the cats are ravenous. It’s been three days since her last appearance and the mother looks thinner, no doubt being stripped of her own milk by the squeaking, demanding kittens. There’s the tiny carcass of a mouse nearby, but the mother goes at the cat food like a gannet.

  Jutta hurries through the corridors, noting the piece of string she’d hooked loosely over the door handle hasn’t been moved, and arrives at the window, pulling up another pallet to hoist herself higher. She waits two or three minutes and sees no one walking in the alleyway, then leaps so her waist balances on the ledge. She hooks one leg through, followed by the other, before turning and easing herself out backwards and feet first, dragging her bag behind her. Her chest scrapes over the rough window frame and she feels her heart bound out of its cavity and pummel against the splintering wood, fast and fierce. Hanging there, exposed across the divide, it’s the first time that real doubt hits her squarely: what the hell are you doing, Jutta?

  But it’s too late. She has no leverage to scrabble back up, and she can only drop the foot or so to the ground, luckily with no resounding thud. She spins instantly and scans the area quickly with ears and eyes. Nothing but background city traffic. Brushing herself off, she loosens the grip on her hair and shakes it out, reining in her heaving breath. Tentatively, she steps beyond the workshop opposite, bracing herself for border guards to shout and approach at any second.

  ‘Fräulein, what are you doing here?’

  Jutta recoils instantly, hand to her mouth, her eyes – no doubt wild – settling on a man not in Vopo grey-green, but a grubby, oily overall. He puffs resolutely on a thin cigarette, runs his eyes up and down her clothes. Leering, mixed with suspicion.

  ‘Um, I’m …’ Jutta spies a garage sign above his head and grasps for an excuse ‘… looking for a mechanic called Rainer.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ The man puffs some more. ‘We’ve no Rainer working here. Can I help?’

  ‘No, it’s Rainer I need. I’ve obviously got the wrong place. No problem, I’ll find him.’

  ‘Perhaps you better had. Good day then, Fräulein.’

  Jutta smiles, perhaps too hard, and begins walking, seeking breath from somewhere inside and pushing out beyond the alleyways. It wasn’t even close and yet she is trembling from head to foot. If it wasn’t for Karin …

  Rounding the corrugated building, there is nothing unremarkable about the scene in front: a war-torn, half-built everyday street in Berlin, buildings pocked with bullet holes and memories of conflict. An old East German Trabant – much mocked in the West as a ‘sparkplug with a roof’ – drives by, its tiny engine whining, and she almost laughs at the timing. There’s no doubt. Jutta is in East Berlin. She is a Wall-jumper.

  She steadies herself, pushes back her shoulders and strides out north, guided by the memorised map. It feels an age since she was in East Berlin, not having crossed the border to see friends as frequently as Karin, and she tries to remember what it was like. Now, Jutta emerges from the cluster of workshops to a street where there are still sporadic gaps in a strip of once grand structures – either fallen or demolished from war wounding. It seems not so much grey, as the Western news reports often paint life here, but washed out and bleached. Like an old black and white image that has been given a watery coating of colour and is struggling to retain the pigment. She walks away from the sight line of the guards’ watchtower and towards residential blocks, where there are men with newspapers and women pushing baby carriages and people hovering outside shops. Momentarily, she wonders why they don’t just go in, and then remembers it’s the queues that are talked of: scoffed at by Westerners, tolerated by the East.

  With each step away from the Wall, the tremors within begin to settle. The sight of a yellow, wide-snout bus is familiar and comforting, and the traffic distinctly thinner, with Trabants – or ‘Trabis’ – and the heavier Wartburgs chugging out dense exhaust fumes, dominating the traffic in the same way that VW Beetles do in picture-postcard West Berlin. It’s her Berlin – and yet not. With each step, Jutta gains confidence, easing rather than throwing off her paranoia entirely, but when no one looks at her too hard or scrutinises her mode of dress, she begins to move with purpose.

  Reluctant to use her map and appear lost, Jutta uses the Wall as her guide, following the signs for checkpoints off to her left, but staying clear enough not to glimpse the harsh sight of its hardware. She’s walking so briskly that her calves begin to ache and she yearns to dip down into one of the U-Bahn stations, but she has no idea which lines go where now, and it strikes her that one half of her home city – the place that has been so open all of Jutta’s life – is alien to her.

  When plotting her path in the days prior, Jutta felt determined to avoid Berlin’s main thoroughfare of the Unter den Linden, fearing it would draw her to the Brandenburg Gate, the site of raw memories that still sting like an open sore. But the Charité is directly north of the square on which the Gate stands, and she is struggling to get her bearings in this strange new city. There’s no choice but to hug closer to the Wall.

  In Jutta’s lifetime, the grand avenue has been transformed dramatically time and again; she and Karin would have been only four or five when Mama brought them down in the early years of the war, heading towards Alexanderplatz. Then, the whole boulevard seemed awash with the crimson flags of the Reich, draped from the grand buildings or flutte
ring from white, gothic columns. Her memories are patchy, but she recalls vividly the deep red and the squeeze of Mama’s hand as she pulled the twins along swiftly, as if the grandeur was overwhelming. Only later did Jutta realise that her mother found the scene unpalatable, alongside a good deal of Berliners.

  Then, just after the war, the complete lack of life and colour; the Unter den Linden as a moonscape of bombed-out buildings, the sad sight of the grand but ruined Adlon Hotel, its sign coated in brick dust and doors firmly closed. But as the red carpet road to Berlin’s beloved gate to freedom, the avenue was pledged to be rebuilt and restored after the war. It would be grand again, so everyone said. That was before the divide. Now, the avenue is sharply nondescript and almost empty, but she is pulled again towards the Wall by some inexplicable force.

  This is the first time Jutta has seen the Gate since the days after the barricades went up; she viewed it then as if in a fantastical dream, the confused, milling crowds peering through the barbed wire to a cut-off world. Now, the twisted metal is an embellishment to the cemented breeze-blocks, in perhaps the neatest part of the barrier. There are the inevitable border guards, peering from watchtowers, but nothing much is in evidence in front of the Wall itself, and Jutta cannot see through to her part of Berlin, towards home. Even the towering columns of the Gate on the East side seem smaller, their grounded stumps hidden by hoardings. Jutta crosses quickly from the Adlon across the Pariser Platz, forcing herself to look at the stark breeze-blocks against the elegant stone of the Gate, and it gives her the courage to keep moving; if she takes Karin out of the equation, it’s the saddest sight she has seen since that day in 1961.

  Right now, though, she can’t change it, and so Jutta wills herself to push on, ignoring the ache in her feet until she reaches the edge of the Charité’s complex. When the grand old red-brick hospital comes into view, she braces herself for confrontation and disappointment. If this doesn’t bear fruit, then what? Where is there left to search?

  The reception area is a clinical white, contrasted with age-old darkened wood of a sweeping stair bannister, its history as Berlin’s oldest hospital unable to be wiped out even by socialism. Muted voices are swallowed by the lofty ceiling, and the area is as calm and hushed as you’d want a hospital to be. Jutta pulls in her courage, like a woman of old gathering her skirts, and strides up to the reception desk, manned by a stern-faced woman in a shapeless tweed suit.

  Jutta manufactures an instant smile. ‘Good morning, Fräulein,’ she begins.

  The woman stares, heavy jowls squatting on her face like another blockade. ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is a strange request, but I’m looking for an old school friend – I’ve just arrived in East Berlin, and I don’t have her address. All I know is that she was a patient here almost two years ago. In fact, it was the same weekend … well, when the barrier was erected.’ Jutta is careful to gird her language. It’s not a Wall here.

  Nothing. The scowling fräulein is in no mood, and needs gentle manipulation.

  ‘I’m aware it’s not the done thing to reveal anything of former patients,’ Jutta forges on, ‘but I’ve heard everyone at the Charité is very kind, and I know my friend would be so grateful to you for helping me to reach her.’

  The woman harrumphs. ‘Not such a good friend if she doesn’t write and tell you where she lives, is she?’

  The gentle massage of the woman’s ego is not working, and Jutta’s panic begins to climb, lungs wheezing inside her chest and breath catching in her throat. Any minute and it could overwhelm her into tears.

  Do not cry. Sadness will not soften this fräulein.

  ‘I can see you’re very busy. Is there an administration office I can try?’ Jutta tries again, the pitch of her voice beginning to surge towards the ornate ceiling.

  Not even a dismissive grunt this time, just a determined glare.

  ‘Her name is Karin Voigt – you don’t recognise it, do you?’ Jutta prods one last time, in growing desperation.

  The fräulein folds her arms, donning her full suit of armour.

  ‘Is there a problem here, Fräulein Bruner?’ A man’s voice comes from behind Jutta and she spins at the words – his tone is conciliatory, not challenging. What’s more, he doesn’t look as if he’s about to show her out, or call in the Stasi. Judging by his white coat, he’s a medic, and he looks nice. Kind, as doctors should be but aren’t always.

  She gulps back air and relief. ‘I’m looking for a good friend, someone who was treated here,’ she repeats.

  He puts a hand on her upper arm, and leads her away from the ogre Bruner, with persuasion rather than force, and Jutta relents. She’s too weary for anything else.

  ‘I heard,’ he says, gesturing his head. ‘And the name?’ This doctor, with grey eyes and short, thinning brown hair, is looking at Jutta intently, as if he somehow recognises her.

  ‘Karin Voigt. Do you know her?’ Jutta says, her anguish too obvious.

  He seems startled by hearing Jutta’s voice again and pulls back a little, as if reassuring himself that it’s not her exactly. But someone very like her.

  ‘Come with me,’ he says, and ushers Jutta two flights up the commanding stairway and down a long corridor, where the building becomes distinctly less ornate, the walls a tired tobacco yellow. The doctor says nothing, just guiding her along. He might be leading her to the hospital’s security office, with a phone hotline to the Stasi, but Jutta has no choice but to follow. With only intuition to rely on, she senses that this man knows of Karin and is taking her somewhere quiet to reveal good information. It’s the only thing she can hope for.

  At the end of the corridor, he opens the door to a large room, thick with cigarette smoke, overpowered by a pungent smell of grease. People in uniforms of varying colours – nurses and porters – sit in lines of tables, forking food into their mouths and talking, largely in a hushed whisper.

  ‘Have a seat in the corner over there,’ the doctor gestures to an empty table. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  ‘So, do you know my …?’ Jutta begins, but he’s gone, the flap of his white coat already at the door.

  Despite her angst, Jutta is glad of the seat, with her feet starting to throb. She’s thirsty too, and even though the coffee smells bitter, the thought of a mouthful preoccupies her. Then, a sudden presence, a shadow to the side, and it’s not the build of the doctor. Instantly, there’s a certain familiarity, a sensation of that thread being tweaked. She almost doesn’t want to look, in case her mind is playing tricks and only servicing her most intense desire. Eventually, she does, flicking up her eyes in disbelief.

  ‘Hello Ja-Ja,’ Karin says.

  26

  Together

  1st July 1963, East Berlin

  They don’t throw their arms around each other, hugging and kissing in making up the lost months. The magnetism between the both of them is like a life force that would thrust nature’s elements together, but the shared understanding of a need for restraint is stronger. No joy on show, not yet.

  ‘Hello Karin, you look well.’ She doesn’t – Jutta is spinning a minor lie for her sister’s sake; in reality, she thinks Karin looks pale and wan, bled of the particular zest that always made her sister so lively, vibrant and determined. But why would Karin want to hear such truth, today of all days? Her glorious long, black hair is now cut into a blunt bob, one side hooked behind her ear, and she has lost weight: her face more angular now, even bordering on gaunt. For someone of twenty-six, she looks simply tired.

  Karin slides in beside Jutta and finally they’re allowed the connection, a fizz as their bodies meet, two elements of a lightbulb touching to produce light; their hands lock under the table and grip firmly. For a second, almost two years of their lives slips away.

  ‘So good to see you,’ Jutta begins, but she’s not entirely sure how to go on, having imagined the words would come tumbling out, but they don’t. They’re stuck in a halfway house of disbelief and hope.

  The white c
oat of Dr Simms returns and he half-smiles at Jutta and leans in close to Karin. ‘I’ve cleared it with your supervisor,’ he says in a low voice. ‘Why don’t you both go to a café, have a talk? You’ve an hour at least.’

  Karin nods and smiles, looks as if she might reach out to clasp at his hand in thanks, but doesn’t. ‘Yes, we will. Thank you, Walter.’

  He turns and strides up to the food counter, while Karin inches out of her seat.

  ‘I’ll just get my cardigan from the locker,’ she says.

  Inside, Jutta oozes relief – it’s good that Karin keeps up the pretence of merely leaving for the allotted hour. Still, she feels for her sister then, in having to leave everything of her new life behind; she can picture that Karin will have made even the starkest of rooms warm and welcoming, spread with her sewing paraphernalia. But they can’t chance a return to Karin’s home, risk a neighbour even suspecting she is packing the smallest bag to leave, that much Jutta has gleaned from her eavesdropping on the escape helpers and their conversations. The advice is always to drop everything and go, taking only the clothes you stand up in.

  It’s warm enough outside that Karin doesn’t need a cardigan, but Jutta can see why she would want to shroud the washed-out blue of her shapeless dress, covering the indelible stain on one pocket. It’s the same uniform that Jutta saw a hospital worker wearing as she piloted a weighty electronic polisher over the corridor floor, and it strikes Jutta for the first time that her sister is not a nursing employee, but a domestic one. She has every respect for the cleaners in the university, keeping the library spotless despite the slovenly students, but for Karin, with so much creative ambition running through every sinew within her? Jutta feels a rollercoaster of intense sadness squaring up inside her. But that’s about to change. From today, they can go back to some sort of normality.