Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  Richter asked hesitantly, “Did you and your friend—uh, the Russian—did you have any luck figuring this out?”

  Jansen thought of the running dead woman, and the barbed wire mending itself. Even now some things were too crazy for him to say straight out.

  “It has to be something to do with the Wall. Right? Has to. I mean, it’s what’s here.” He watched for a reaction, but saw none. “And Gavrilenko and me, we were both on the Wall a couple of years after it went up. Nineteen sixty-three, sixty-four—kids, both of us. He was a guard over there, I was an MP over here. Never got above Specialist 4, so I did some of everything. Pulled patrol, hauling drunk GIs out of bars, clubs, like that. A little checkpoint duty right here”—he gestured around him—“but mostly I was in an observation post over on the Axel-Springer-Strasse. That’s how we knew each other back then, two strangers waving across the Wall in the mornings.” He realized that he was now talking much too fast, and consciously slowed his speech. “Long ago, all that crap. You wouldn’t be interested—you weren’t even born then.”

  “Yes, I was,” Richter said quietly. He said nothing more for a few moments, studying Jansen out of chestnut-brown eyes set in an angular, thoughtful face. “There’s a Marriott there now, you know, at that corner. In the real world, I mean. Right where the Wall was.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve stayed there. My wife’s German, so we visit. And I’ve got a little business going.” He looked around slowly, then shrugged. “Weird. Only seen it like this in pictures. Maybe you can tell me about it?”

  Jansen blinked. “Tell you about what?”

  “Berlin in those days. When you were a kid MP—probably a couple of years out of high school, right?” He did not wait for Jansen’s answering nod. “See, I was born in Berlin, but I wasn’t raised here. Didn’t come back until the Wall fell in ’89—just felt I had to, somehow—and that’s how I met Annaliese.” The smile was simultaneously proud and tender. “We live in St. Paul. Three boys, a girl, and an Irish setter. I mean, how bourgeois American can you get?”

  “Wouldn’t know,” Jansen said. “Wish I knew what’s keeping Gavrilenko.”

  “Listen, let’s sit down somewhere, okay? While we wait for your Russian friend.”

  Richter walked around the guard shack and hoisted himself up onto the top row of sandbags. Jansen followed him, and he and Richter sat with their legs dangling, looking straight ahead, both of them unconsciously kicking their heels against the sandbags’ brown canvas. The tall man was the first to speak. “Hard to believe these were for real. Not exactly a lot of protection.”

  “Better than nothing,” Jansen said. “I wasn’t in the Army then, but in October of ’61, a few months after the Wall went up, there was an all-day standoff right here between our guys—40th Armor, 6th Infantry—and about thirty Russian tanks. See, we were set to show them that we could still drive anywhere we wanted in the GDR, and they were going to show us that those days were over. And you better believe there were dogfaces crouching behind these same sandbags, locked and loaded and ready to start World War Three, just say the word. I saw the pictures in the Wurtsboro paper.”

  Richter shrugged. “I’ve read about the standoff. Seems a little ridiculous, frankly. Awful lot of chestbeating for something that didn’t even last a day.”

  “True. But it could have been worse. Ask me, the Russkies came out on top, any way you slice it—from that point on they handed out a lot of shit here, every crossing, and it may have been small shit, but we couldn’t give it back since we had orders to play nice. Well…. not all of them. That’s not fair. Mainly it was the generals who were trouble, the big ones who gave the orders and made asses of themselves when they’d come into West Berlin. The men were okay. Russkies, Krauts, they were okay. Even some of the VoPos.”

  “Ah. The Volkspolizei.”

  “Just like us MPs, only with more training and a lot more firepower.” Jansen chuckled in his throat. “We had a big snowball fight with a bunch of VoPos one time.” He paused, reflecting. “Couldn’t make a decent snowball for shit, most of them. Always wondered about that.”

  Richter cocked his head slightly to the side, considering Jansen meditatively. “So you actually had fun, too. It wasn’t all confrontations with tanks and going into bars after drunken soldiers.”

  “Trick was to keep from staying in the bars with the drunken soldiers,” Jansen told him. “The city was booming with bars, with clubs, a couple new ones opening every week. Some you’d go to for the beer, some for the great music—one time I heard Nat King Cole and Les Paul and Mary Ford on the same night. Two-buck tickets! Some places, you’d take a young lady, some others you’d go to find a young lady. Yeah, we had a lot of fun in Berlin. Nineteen-, twenty-year-old kids with guns and money, never been away from home before, never drunk anything stronger than Pabst? We had fun.”

  Jansen studied Richter. The man’s expression was an odd mixture of wistfulness and something deeper, something impatient beyond his interest in Jansen’s surfacing memories. For his part, Jansen had not talked this much to anyone in a very long while, and he’d never shared these stories, not even with Elly or the kids. Sharing would have meant deliberately remembering everything, which even the drinking couldn’t deal with. Here, though, that self-imposed restriction was as pointless as the rest of it.

  “There was a game we used to play,” he said. “Worked best in the winter too, only we didn’t need snow for this one, we needed ice.” He pointed ahead of them, toward a broad white line painted on the ground. “That’s the border, near as anybody could figure. Ground got good and icy, you’d take a run and throw yourself down, and slide, like you’re sliding into a base, only you’re sliding right into the GDR.” He laughed outright at the memory. “Then you’d get up and run right back across the line, safe in the good old American Sector. The Krauts used to watch us and just laugh themselves silly.”

  Richter said musingly, almost to himself, “All those good times…. and all the things going on just under the surface.” Jansen frowned, not understanding. Richter went on. “More than a hundred thousand people tried to escape into West Berlin from East Germany in the twenty-eight years the Wall sealed it off. Did you know that, Henry?”

  “Knew it was a lot,” Jansen said. “Didn’t know it was that many—thought the big rush was all before the Wall.”

  “It was. But another hundred thousand, afterward. Most went to jail. Maybe five thousand made it through. And a lot died. But you were here. You know that.”

  Her dark hair, her pale-blue eyes, the little sound she made at the last, dying….

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Richter had turned away, looking toward the point where the blackness slashed down forever on the East German apartment buildings. But his voice was clear and precise as he said, “Different organizations have different estimates. When the Wall fell, when Germany was reunited, the East German state wasn’t in any hurry to release records that made them look like the killers they were. We’ve had to build up a database one case at a time, literally. One escape attempt at a time. One body at a time. Counting the heart attacks, the wounds that turned fatal on the other side of the Wall, the ones who just disappeared forever, the babies smothered trying to keep them quiet. Officially—you check the encyclopedia articles, the tourist handouts—only 136 people died. But we’re figuring twelve hundred, minimum. Not that we’ll ever be able to prove half of them.” His voice was calm and almost expressionless, utterly dispassionate.

  “We,” Jansen said. “Who’s we?”

  Richter laughed suddenly, warmly, with a touch of embarrassment as faint as his accent. “I’m sorry. I forget not everyone is as obsessed with this as I am. We is the August 13 Society—I do fundraising for them in the States, and volunteer work for them when I’m here…. I mean, there. Real Berlin. We’re actually trying to document every case where people died trying to cross, not just the Wall, but the entire East-West border—to memoriali
ze them, make them real for everybody. So they won’t be forgotten again.”

  Jansen nodded, but did not respond.

  Richter said presently, “What I can’t figure out is the connection between all three of us—you and me and our absent Russian. Before you showed up I thought I’d driven into a rail, that maybe I was dead and this was Hell; or else maybe I’d stroked out and was in a coma somewhere while my imagination played really bad games with me. But those two possibilities would exclude you, so cross them off the whiteboard…. which leaves nothing. I’ve never before met either one of you, and you were both long gone from Berlin by the time I came back. So what’s the link?”

  “What’s if it’s just…. I don’t know, random. Coincidence.”

  “I don’t buy that. I’m a mathematician, Henry. Anyway I was a mathematician, before I put together my little software company. This place may be impossible, but the odds against a common pattern when two of the three of us have an obvious connection? Maybe not totally impossible…. let’s just say highly unlikely.”

  Jansen said, “We sort of have the Wall in common. But it isn’t the same. You obviously know a lot about it, what with this Society thing you do. But it’s not like you ever served here. You didn’t live with it every day, like us. You weren’t ever on the Wall—”

  “No,” Richter agreed. “I wasn’t.”

  To Jansen’s eye, Richter seemed suddenly tense and hesitant, like someone trying to avoid making up his mind.

  “Well,” Jansen spoke up. “What is it? You going to shoot that bird or let it fly?”

  The tall man nodded. “Interesting choice of words.”

  “My stupid mouth is half the reason I’m divorced. What’d I say this time?”

  Richter hopped off the sandbags and walked a few steps before answering. When he did, his voice was dry and tight. “My mother was a Berliner.”

  “Yeah, you said you were born here. So?”

  “East Berlin, Henry. She died on the Wall.”

  Jansen wanted to run again, like before, but his legs wouldn’t get him down off the barrier. If he couldn’t run, maybe he could scream?

  Not your hell, maybe, you poor bastard. Definitely mine.

  When he finally found words, they surprised him. “You don’t sound like you’re sure.”

  Richter turned and looked at him oddly. Jansen wondered if something unheard in his voice had given him away. He was about to speak again when the tall man finally answered.

  “The records are all scrambled—when there are records at all—and they mostly don’t have names in them, just scraps of facts and description. An address here, an occupation there, a set of initials, shorthand reports of a thousand disconnected, meaningless conversations…. it’s a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. I’ve been digging through the archives for a long time, learning how to read what’s there and what’s been omitted.” His mouth tightened. “She died on the Wall, all right. The pieces of the picture are there.”

  “But you aren’t certain.”

  “If you’re asking me whether I have the Stasi-stamped file folder to prove it, no.” Bitterness colored Richter’s voice, and something Jansen couldn’t begin to put a name to. He watched as the tall man stared fiercely at the ragged fringe of East German buildings that were visible from here.

  “I never knew her,” Richter continued. “My step-parents were friends with my mother, and they brought me with them when they got out of East Germany in 1960. It was her idea. She wasn’t well—pregnancy and childbirth had been rough—and anyway she knew it would be easier for them, because they’d had a baby who died and they still had the right papers. The idea was that my mother would make it out on her own when she got better, and we’d all be in America together.” His faint smile was small and young. “Only they built the Wall, and things didn’t work out. She never showed up. One letter made it: nothing else. The Bruckners raised me on their own, in Wisconsin. They were good people. I can’t complain.”

  “What about your father? Where the hell was he?” Unsummoned, there was a vision of Arl in Jansen’s head, crying into Elly’s arms because Larry had left without so much as a note two days after the little pink dot on the dipstick changed everything.

  “Apparently I’m the by-product of a little too much Pilsner at a college party. She never told anyone his name, not even the Bruckners, not even with all the pressure of being nineteen and pregnant in a police state where social pressure favored abortion. All I know about der fehlende Vater is that he must have been tall and blonde, because according to my step-parents nobody in my mother’s family was. It had to come from somewhere.”

  The woman at the Wall. Got to be his mother. Goddamit, goddamit, tell him what you saw, you stupid fucking coward…. but maybe I don’t have to. Maybe, maybe if I just shut up he’ll talk about something else.

  Where the hell’s Gavrilenko?

  At the same moment, Richter said “Enough with my sob story. I seriously don’t think your Russian’s coming. Let’s go find him.” He started off without looking back.

  “Hold up,” Jansen said, easing down off the sandbags. His knee had stiffened while he was sitting. “Old guy, here. Anyway, maybe we shouldn’t be in such a hurry.”

  Richter stopped and looked at him quizzically. “Why not?”

  Tell him you saw his mother. Tell him you saw her die. Twice.

  “No reason.” Jansen stared into Richter’s eyes. How could he have missed how much they looked like hers? “It’s just…. what if we take a different route than he does, coming here, and we miss each other?”

  “Then we’ll come back. Anyway, there’s not a whole lot of there over there. Come on,” Richter said, and this time his grin was a young boy’s. “It’s not icy, but I bet we can imagine we’re sliding across the line.”

  The Wall on this side ran behind houses that looked like an abandoned stage or movie set: if the west side looked as though every inhabitant had suddenly left town, but might return at any second, here the air of a forced and permanent evacuation was glaringly inescapable. Doors and windows were not merely boarded over, but bricked up as well; many buildings had been demolished, and the rubble—often topped with barbed wire—left in place, to block any passage to the Wall. There were warnings, genuine or not, of minefields—Richter translated the signs for Jansen—and the whole effect was of desertion and neglect. The two men walked close together, automatically speaking in low voices and moving at a pace tailored to accommodate Jansen’s slower steps.

  Chickenshit. You could walk faster. You’re just afraid of getting there.

  Jansen asked presently, “You got into it, this August thing, because of your mom?” But Richter shook his head.

  “Not exactly, not the way you mean. My step-parents wanted me to grow up to be a good American, so I was assimilated as hell. They told me about my mom—her name was Zinzi, by the way—but not much else, not until I was older. I definitely had the American habit of not thinking about the past very much, and certainly not some faraway European past that might as well have been in an old library book, as far as I was concerned. My head was all forward, all the time. I went to a good college, studied math and computer programming, got naturalized, taught for a while. I was an assistant professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin when I came to Berlin to drink dark beer and knock down my own piece of the Wall and wound up meeting Annaliese instead. Hah. Hey, I never asked—you married?”

  “Already told you I was divorced. Twice, actually.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Just the ways things are.” Jansen felt his heart thudding harder in his chest. “My first ex used to say I was a coconut in a world of bananas. I can hurt people just bumping into them.”

  “Colorful. Any kids?”

  “Two daughters. They hate my guts too, but the pregnant one hates me worse. So there’s a bright spot.”

  Richter stopped walking and turned to face Jansen. “Even if things righteously
suck with your kids, I’m sure you remember when they were little. So maybe you’ll get this. When Jacob—my son—when Jacob turned six months old, the same age I was when I was brought to America…. I remember, I looked down at him in my arms, burping bubbles and trying to eat my shirt buttons, and I tried to imagine what Zinzi Richter would have said if she could have seen him, her first grandchild. And I thought how lucky I was to be able to tell him everything my step-parents had told me about her, even if it wasn’t all that much. Then I started thinking about all the people who wouldn’t ever know what happened to their grandparents or their parents, and I’d read about the August 13 Society, and one thing led to another. I’d started up my company by then—we do case management software for big legal firms—and our code was pretty useful for what the Society does, so I had an in. And here I am.” He smiled crookedly, spreading his hands.

  “Makes sense,” Jansen said.

  “You should tell Jacob that. He thinks I’m crazy. My mother really is just a page in a scrapbook to him. He’s going to be fifteen next June, and what he likes about coming over here is that he’s tall enough now to get away with telling the local girls he’s really seventeen.”

  They started on again, both of them unconsciously keeping to the right side of the road, away from the darkness they could see on the other side of the decayed and empty buildings. To Jansen it definitely seemed closer here, which bothered him. He thought of the suddenly open door back on the Axel-Springer-Strasse, and the words herding us passed through his mind.

  Richter said, “You can tell I’m nervous, because I’m talking too much.”

  That surprised Jansen. “You don’t act nervous.”

  “Quaking in my Nikes. Not the slightest sign of danger since I showed up here, but this place is really starting to creep me out. Hence the talking.”

  “So talk,” Jansen said firmly. “Tell me more about your kids.”

  “I’d rather listen. Tell me what you do.”