A Great Escape

by Felice Arena

  But is that possible?

  It’s not until dawn that Peter’s nerves calm down. He checks to see that no one is around, stumbles to his feet, and runs.

  When he gets home, Oma and Opa are still asleep. He sneaks back into his bedroom, grabs Margrit’s soft toy duck, jumps under the covers, and holds it tightly.

  ‘If I’m going to escape,’ he whispers into his pillow. ‘I’ve got to be a whole lot smarter than that.’

  Tauben

  PIGEONS

  ‘We thought you were going to sleep all day,’ says Oma, as Peter enters the kitchen and grabs a couple of pieces of Filinchen crispbread, one of his favourite snacks. He heads for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Oma asks.

  ‘I’m going back to the checkpoint. Hopefully I can see them again,’ says Peter.

  ‘Sit down,’ orders Oma. ‘I’ll fry you an egg first.’

  Peter sighs and sits down at the table next to Opa, who is having coffee and is chewing on a Ketwurst, a hotdog with ketchup.

  Peter half smiles at him, but he’s not in the mood to talk. He can’t stop thinking about the young man in the river. He chews his fingernails as Oma cracks an egg in the frypan.

  ‘There you go,’ she says, placing Peter’s breakfast in front of him. When she leaves the room, Opa bites off a piece of hotdog and spits it at him to get his attention.

  ‘Opa! What are you doing? That’s disgusting!’ Peter says.

  Opa grunts at him. He slurs a couple of words that Peter doesn’t catch.

  ‘Slow down,’ Peter says, starting to scoff down the fried egg. ‘Or I can’t understand.’

  ‘Hab’ dich gesehen!’ Opa slurs. ‘Saw you!’

  Peter stops eating. He heard it clearly this time. He looks up at his opa.

  ‘You saw me?’ he whispers, looking back to make sure Oma isn’t in earshot. She isn’t. She’s in her bedroom. ‘You mean last night?’

  Opa nods. ‘Ent … flie … hen. Es … cape.’

  Peter pauses. He promised Oma he wouldn’t even consider trying to escape to the West. Would Opa tell her? He hesitates. But Opa spits more Ketwurst at him.

  ‘Stop that, will you? How much do you have in there?’

  Opa raises his eyebrows.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Peter says, leaning into him. But before he can say anything else, Oma steps back into the room.

  ‘What are you two whispering about?’ she says.

  ‘Nothing!’ says Peter. ‘Opa has Ketwurst stuck in his teeth. So what are we going to do?’

  ‘About food stuck in Opa’s teeth?’

  ‘No! About getting to the West.’

  ‘I’m not sure what any of us can do,’ says Oma. ‘But I’m going to visit the visa office. Perhaps they might make some arrangements for families that have been separated.’

  ‘Has Mutti called us?’ asks Peter. They don’t have a telephone in their apartment, but Frau Roeder does, He knows his mother will try to call there if she can.

  ‘Frau Roeder spends all day by the phone, waiting for Sabine to call. Or for Manfred’s father to call with information. But no one knows what has happened to him,’ Oma tells Peter. ‘She said your mother tried to call yesterday, but the operator was having problems making the connection, or so they said. I can only imagine how many divided families like us are trying to make contact.’

  Peter wants so badly to hear his parents’ voices and to ask them what he should do. ‘Can we call Vatti’s work?’ he asks.

  ‘We’ll try tomorrow, although we may not get through as I’m sure Frau Roeder’s phone will be tapped. She’s the mother of a deserter now, and the Stasi will be monitoring all calls coming from the West in any case. It’s probably a good thing your parents didn’t get through to us – for now.’

  Peter sighs. He has learned how dangerous trying to escape can be, but Oma is making him feel that staying is dangerous too.

  At Invalidenstrasse, where Peter last saw his parents and sister, he watches the guards keeping people away from the barbed-wire barrier. Construction teams have arrived and they’re building an actual wall – mortaring bricks into place.

  Peter scans the crowd over on the west side. He doesn’t see his family.

  Perhaps they’ve just decided to get on with their lives without me, he thinks glumly. He wonders where they will live in the West. Maybe they’re staying at one of the transit refugee camps – like the one called Marienfelde, he thinks. Oma had pointed out a photograph of that camp in the newspaper and said it would be such an awful thing to go through that process – to be herded about like cattle.

  Peter hopes his family is staying with friends or one of his father’s colleagues from the cinema house where he works. Peter hadn’t really paid attention to the details of his father’s work before, but he wishes he had.

  Peter turns and walks aimlessly along the wide streets. It’s an overcast day and low-hanging clouds blend in with the grey of the concrete slab buildings and the asphalt roads. Peter approaches the street Frau Roeder had told them about – where the apartment buildings sit right on the border. The front doors and façades of the buildings open to the West, but the rest of the apartment block is in the East. Peter thinks of the residents and how nervous they must be, wondering if tomorrow they’ll have a roof over their heads. At least Opa, Oma and I still have a home, he thinks.

  When Peter is about a block away from the border buildings, he notices a handful of brave people protesting – mostly university students. They’re chanting political slogans that Peter doesn’t really understand.

  ‘This is absurd,’ Peter overhears a couple of students as they pass him on their way to join the protesters. ‘I heard the State is planning to bulldoze the apartment buildings. How can they do that? The world is crazy.’

  Peter nods. The world is crazy!

  He looks up and sees three pigeons in the sky flying over the western part of the city. Those birds have more freedom than we do now, he thinks. They can leave whenever they want.

  Peter watches the pigeons. They fly in sync, circling over the same area. They don’t look like common street pigeons that fly in all directions looking for scraps. Peter keeps his eye on the three as they head his way.

  The protesters continue to chant as more and more of them arrive.

  The birds circle the rooftop of an apartment building that backs onto one of the border buildings. One by one the pigeons come in for a landing and then disappear from view.

  Peter is curious. He runs over to the front of the building, steps through the main entrance and races up the stairwell. It looks just like his family’s apartment building. Halfway up, he almost collides with a girl about his age racing down the steps.

  ‘Hey, watch it!’ she snaps, looking back over her shoulder at Peter.

  Reaching the top floor Peter climbs a final, short set of stairs that lead to the rooftop. He steps out. No one is around. He looks for the pigeons. They are nowhere in sight, but there is a small pigeon coop in the centre of the roof. It’s a basic construction of chicken wire and wooden boxes stacked on top of each other.

  Peter makes his way across to the edge of the roof and looks west. There’s a very narrow street, almost a laneway, running between the other rooftop and the one he’s standing on.

  He peers over the ledge and looks down. He starts feeling slightly dizzy and wobbles a step back – it’s a long drop. He sighs.

  ‘What are you doing?’ comes a voice from behind him.

  Fragen

  QUESTIONS

  Peter whips around to see an older boy standing there – he’s maybe fifteen, with jet-black hair that’s slicked back like Elvis Presley’s. He’s wearing a woollen trench coat – in the height of summer.

  ‘I’m not doing anything,’ says Peter. ‘Just looking.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Why does it matter to you?’ says Peter.

  But instead of answering him, the boy looks down at his coat. ‘Wolfgang!’
he says. ‘Shush! Ludwig, leave Wolfgang alone.’

  Peter starts to edge away. Is the boy talking to himself?

  Suddenly the boy digs deep into his coat pockets. To Peter’s surprise, he pulls out three pigeons – two from one pocket and one from the other. Two of them flap onto the ground and toddle around his feet. He pats the third pigeon on the back. ‘That’s enough from you, Felix,’ he says.

  ‘Hey, are they the pigeons I saw circling in the sky?’ Peter asks him excitedly. ‘They’re yours?’

  The boy nods.

  ‘What sort of pigeons are they?’

  ‘Homing pigeons,’ the boy says, dropping the third pigeon gently on the ground, ‘a special breed. They’re trained to always come back to their home base. During the war they were used to send secret messages.’

  ‘Do you use them to send secret notes?’ Peter asks curiously.

  ‘No,’ snaps the teenager, suddenly impatient. ‘I just look after them. I was standing here a while before you noticed me. Were you looking at that dumb barrier on the border?’

  Peter hesitates, but who else is he going to talk to about it all? He’s not sure when he’ll see Hubert next and wonders if he’s even friends with Max anymore. Before he knows it, he’s blurting out his whole story to this stranger.

  ‘And now I’m stuck here with my opa and oma,’ he says breathlessly. ‘My oma says I shouldn’t try to escape to the West because they’ll shoot me. And last night I actually saw someone get shot while trying to swim across the river. Well, he might have been shot. They fired at him. But that’s not going to stop me. I actually have another idea about how to escape – a great escape plan. It just came to me!’

  Peter feels a bit overwhelmed and to his surprise feels a lump in his throat. His face feels flushed, and he’s worried he’s said too much.

  ‘Hey, relax. Take a breath,’ says the boy. Then he digs into another pocket and pulls out a handful of birdseed. ‘Put out your hand. Here.’

  He puts some seed into Peter’s hand, then whistles sharply. The pigeons flap up to him and perch themselves on his forearms.

  The boy puts his arm next to Peter’s. One of the pigeons hops onto Peter’s wrist and begins to peck at the seed in his open palm. Peter feels his breathing calm down.

  ‘Sorry about your family,’ the boy adds. ‘This city’s messed up. This country’s messed up. The whole world is messed up. They’ve messed it up for all of us.’

  ‘They?’ says Peter, gently stroking the pigeon. Its feathers are so soft and smooth.

  ‘Adults. Adults mess everything up.’

  Peter contemplates that for a moment as they silently watch the pigeons eat.

  ‘I’m Otto,’ says the boy.

  ‘Peter,’ says Peter.

  ‘Felix really likes you, Peter.’

  ‘You said you look after them. Who owns them?’ Peter asks.

  ‘More questions,’ says Otto, but he’s smiling. ‘Their owner used to live here, but now he’s stuck in the West, so I guess they are mine now. He was only going over there for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Can you take the pigeons back to your home?’

  ‘I can’t. It’s not easy to re-home a homing pigeon,’ Otto says. ‘They’ll just keep flying back here.’

  ‘What are their names again?’ Peter asks.

  ‘That one is Wolfgang. He’s named after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And this plucky guy is Ludwig, after Ludwig van Beethoven. And the smallest one, the one you’re holding, is Felix, after Felix Mendelssohn. The old man loves classical music – and he named these three after his favourite composers. They’re sort of like his kids.’

  ‘So these birds are your adopted children now,’ says Peter earnestly.

  ‘Das ist lustig!’ Otto says. ‘That’s funny! I guess they are. So tell me more about your great escape.’

  ‘Well, it came to me when I was watching these three in the sky. I was thinking if I had wings I could take a running jump off this roof and fly over onto the rooftop of that building. And then off that rooftop and into the West. Brilliant, right?’

  Fliegen

  FLYING

  Otto laughs so much it sets off a coughing fit.

  Peter feels embarrassed. He’s annoyed by Otto’s response.

  ‘Fly?’ Otto finally manages to say. ‘That’s a good one.’

  ‘It wasn’t a joke,’ Peter says.

  Otto snorts a couple more times before he regains his composure. He takes Felix from Peter and moves back towards the coop, cradling all three pigeons.

  Peter makes a move back towards the stairwell. He isn’t going to stick around just to be made fun of.

  ‘Come on, you really didn’t think you could fly?’ Otto calls after him as he places the pigeons in the pen. ‘Don’t you think that if it were as simple as strapping on some homemade wings we would all be flying by now? You know basic biology, don’t you?’

  ‘No, but I suppose you do,’ Peter snaps defensively.

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ Otto says. ‘Birds have special air sacs connected to their lungs that help them fly. They also have a lightweight skeletal system – their bones are hollow. And their wingspan and wing muscles are huge in proportion to their body size.’

  Peter stops and turns.

  ‘Well, um, I didn’t actually mean flying-flying,’ he says in his own defence, pretending he knew all along. ‘I meant more like, you know, making a set of wings and gliding across.’

  Otto considers the idea. ‘Possibly,’ he says. ‘If you have a strong headwind in your favour and it lifts you. But you still wouldn’t go very far. You’d still be too heavy. You’d be more likely to fall to your death. Splat!’

  ‘But we’re slightly higher than that building over there. So if I ran fast enough, couldn’t I create enough of a lift to make it?’

  Otto shrugs. ‘Hey, if you want to take that risk, who am I to stop you?’

  ‘Well, I just might,’ Peter says defiantly.

  ‘Well, good for you,’ Otto snaps back. ‘How would you build yourself a pair of wings anyway?’

  Peter knows that Otto is just humouring him, but he’s sticking by his idea, as crazy and dangerous as it sounds.

  ‘Cardboard, I guess,’ he replies honestly.

  ‘Nein. Not strong enough,’ says Otto. ‘And you wouldn’t get any lift.’

  ‘Feathers on a wire frame?’

  ‘You’d need to collect a lot of feathers. Thousands and thousands!’

  ‘Well, I could do that,’ Peter declares. ‘Yes, that’s what I’m going to do.’

  Otto stares at Peter with a slight smile.

  ‘There’s no way feathers are going to work, but I might have another idea,’ he says. ‘I’ll help you make these wings on one condition. I live in Prenzlauer Berg with my family, so you take care of the pigeons when I can’t. And if I’m ever not around, they’re your responsibility. Deal?’

  It doesn’t take Peter long to respond.

  ‘Abgemacht! It’s a deal!’ he says, shaking Otto’s hand.

  Ein Mädchen

  A GIRL

  As Peter weaves past other pedestrians he notices a girl walking on the other side of the street. It’s hard to miss her – her fiery red hair stands out against the grey concrete buildings behind her. He picks up his pace. But so does she. When he slows down, she slows down.

  She’s following me, Peter thinks. But why? Maybe she’s got something to do with the secret police Oma was talking about? The Stasi?

  Peter begins to jog and when he glances across the street she isn’t there. But then he spots her again. On his side of the street, about twenty metres directly behind him. She seems familiar. It finally dawns on Peter that she’s the girl from the stairwell.

  Right, enough of this, Peter thinks, and he launches into a sprint. There’s no way she’ll keep up with me!

  Peter bolts and makes a sharp left into Gartenstrasse. He lengthens his stride and runs a couple more blocks. When he turns right into Invalidenstrasse, h
e slows down to a jog and looks back over his shoulder.

  ‘Lost her,’ he pants. But he jogs the rest of the way home anyway. When he gets back, his face feels flushed.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ Oma says, as Peter steps up next to her at the kitchen sink, grabs a glass and fills it with water from the tap.

  ‘Just running,’ he says in between gulps.

  ‘Did you see your parents and sister at the checkpoint?’

  He shakes his head. Something outside the window has caught his eye. There on the street, looking up in his direction, is that girl.

  Peter can’t believe it. He runs out of the apartment, with Oma calling out after him. ‘Peter! Was ist los? What’s going on?’

  When he charges out of the building onto the street the girl is gone. Peter whips his head from side to side. She’s nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Hey, Peter!’ It’s Hubert riding up to him on his bike.

  ‘My mother said you can have dinner with us tonight,’ he says excitedly. But then he remembers the reason his mother invited Peter and frowns. ‘She said you must be … well, you know, um, sad, well, maybe not sad, but kind of down since –’

  ‘Yes, of course I’ll come,’ says Peter, cutting Hubert off. ‘Did you see a girl, with red hair, just now?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Peter sighs. Just then he spots Max and a couple of older boys he doesn’t know walking their way.

  ‘Hi, Hubert!’ Max calls out. Then he notices Peter. ‘Hi, traitor! I heard your family deserted to the West. And, look … you’re stuck here. Too bad.’

  ‘Just ignore him,’ Hubert mutters to Peter.

  But Peter is seething. And he’s already marching towards the boys, with gritted teeth and clenched fists.