Walls

by L. M. Elliott

  Drew shook his head, following her trail of logic. “That’s crazy.”

  “Maybe so. But even a hint of such concerns about him could mean your dad wouldn’t be given sensitive assignments anymore. He might even be rotated back to the States.”

  Pointing toward the window, Drew’s mom suddenly looked oddly paranoid. “Besides protecting us, I worry those gentlemen might be keeping a log of your dad’s comings and goings . . .” She trailed off.

  “What?” Drew spluttered. “You can’t be serious, Mom.”

  She seemed transfixed, her gaze still on the window.

  “Mom!”

  Startling slightly, Drew’s mom tried to sound breezy. “I’m sure I’m being ridiculous, honey. I’ve heard too many horror stories from the refugees, I suppose. Too many conspiracy theories. But”—she kissed his hand before concluding—“it is critically important to remember what I’ve said. And please do not let on to Linda about this. No need to frighten her.”

  “What about Matthias?” After their sleepover, Drew was beginning to consider Matthias a friend. His cousin was coming that afternoon to go swimming in the army’s indoor pool with him and Charlie, Shirley, Joyce, Linda, and a new friend Linda had made while walking her dog. His mom had gone to all sorts of trouble to wrangle special permission for a guest—entry required an American ID. “Shouldn’t he be warned, Mom? The jerk who left Dad that envelope could be someone who knows Matthias and tailed us when we took him home.”

  “Marta and I have already talked about the envelope so she could be on guard,” his mom replied. “But she doesn’t want Matthias to know. She’s afraid that he is . . .” His mom pressed her lips together.

  “That he is what?”

  “Under pressure . . . maybe in trouble with the FDJ. They use kids against kids over there, you know.” Shaking her head in sympathy, Drew’s mom said, “One of the refugee families I processed last week at Marienfelde told me their son—a bit younger than you—was reported for lack of enthusiasm at the Russian’s annual May Day parade. By a boy he thought was his best friend.” She paused. “Can you imagine? The complaint went into his school file as Schwäche, official demerits. Each student has to keep a little black book of records, which parents sign weekly, so his mother saw the demerits.”

  Wow. Drew couldn’t imagine his every move, his every facial expression being scrutinized like that. He’d be in big trouble if they were.

  “At the end of the school year, the boy was told he didn’t have the proper attitude for university. He was expelled from the academic high school. The GDR assigned him instead to a trade school for masons. The boy had dreamed of becoming a violinist, but he mishandled a cement block and crushed his hand.”

  An involuntary shiver ripped through Drew. “Why would a kid rat on his friend like that?” he blurted.

  “Fanaticism breeds that kind of betrayal, honey,” his mom said sadly. “Plus, the government rewards them for it. The GDR sends teenagers up on roofs of apartments and row houses to hunt for TV antennas turned to receive signals from West Germany. When they find them, they break them off. For that, the teens earn a tracksuit like the Olympic teams wear.”

  “What the—” Drew spat out. “Why do Cousin Marta and Matthias stay there?”

  His mom sighed. “Marta wants to finish her training to be a doctor so she can help other women in her sector, give them decent medical care. Plus, once she is a doctor, there are personal benefits—more food rations, the promise of university for Matthias. She’d lose all that if she crossed into the West. Still . . .” She paused, thinking. “As long as the border stays open between East and West Berlin so that she and Matthias can come and go, it makes sense, I suppose. But I know Marta thinks about defecting. Unfortunately, Aunt Hilde’s fears and inability to leave their house is a problem. It’s evidently gotten worse since Christmas.”

  Drew squirmed again, this time with guilt. That Elvis record the Vopos had found on Matthias on the S-Bahn—he was to blame for that. Part of the reason Drew had given Matthias the record was to remind his commie cousin that the music he loved was banned by East Germany’s censors. Just as his gift of Animal Farm was meant to open Matthias’s eyes to communism’s corruption and cruelties. But Drew had never meant to get him in trouble. And Aunt Hilde’s renewed agoraphobia and panic attacks were technically Drew’s fault, too. He felt terrible.

  “Remember that oath to the state Matthias signed?”

  His mom’s question pulled Drew back to her. He nodded. How could he forget?

  “Right now, Matthias is a believer. Marta doesn’t want to lose her last son. Her other two boys—I think they wouldn’t listen to her, and . . .”

  “What?”

  Drew’s mom hesitated and then said carefully, “I’m trusting you not to repeat this, because it would hurt her standing at the hospital. My instincts were right. Marta recently confided that she tried to get her boys out before the final days of street fighting against the Russian army. But they were recruited by the Nazis for Operation Werewolf. Twelve-year-olds were convinced to fight on for the fatherland, even though it meant certain death. They were told that such a sacrifice . . . was somehow noble. Boys manned the last guns. Only a handful survived. Marta’s boys died in a final stand, protecting Charité Hospital as the staff inside tended the wounded.”

  “Cousin Marta’s hospital?”

  “Yes.” She gazed at Drew sorrowfully. “I think . . . that’s another reason she stays.”

  Drew swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry.

  “Anyway, all this is why your befriending Matthias means so much to me, sweetheart. If he comes to trust you, perhaps it will help him see the good in the West and make him want to leave. So, for right now, the less Matthias knows about that letter, the safer it is for him. Marta suspects the teenager who lives on their home’s top floor might be a Stasi informer. And Matthias is friends with him.”

  “That guy who shouted Freundschaft the day we met Aunt Hilde?” Drew choked on the irony.

  “Yes. She doesn’t know for sure that the boy spies for the Stasi, but she suspects.” His mom stood. “Just try to have fun this afternoon, honey.”

  Sure. No problem with that now . . .

  “I don’t think he’s coming,” Linda said, disappointment in her voice. She shifted her dachshund in her arms and gently stroked the old dog’s head. “Is he, Heidi?”

  Sitting beside her on the couch, Joyce looked up at Drew—who’d been pacing, mulling over the conversation he’d had with his mom and getting more and more agitated—and said, “I think we’d better go ahead, don’t you? Matthias is an hour late. Everyone else is waiting.” She and Drew were both excited that Linda had made a new friend—finally—and Joyce clearly didn’t want to screw that up by making the girl wait.

  “I wish Cousin Marta had a telephone,” murmured Linda. “It’s not like Matthias to—” She broke off as the sound of shouting exploded from Bob’s apartment across the stairwell.

  Joyce and Drew exchanged a knowing glance as their mother emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands with a towel as she listened, too. “Why don’t you ask Bob to join you?” she suggested quietly.

  Drew wanted to say she shouldn’t be so quick to invite Bob into their fold. Maybe he should tell her that Bob had threatened to spread rumors about his dad being soft on commies and letting slip sensitive information to their East Berlin cousins. Heck, if Bob were to be questioned by the MPs in that VW bus, he might tell them his accusations if he were in one of his bad moods and mad at Drew for not coughing up intel drawn from Matthias.

  Drew opened his mouth but then stopped. His mom had her do-gooder Emily McMahon look; there was no arguing with that.

  Sighing, he opened the door and crossed the hall. His knock cut short an overly loud command: “C’mon, boy, that’s not the way! Put up your dukes and—”

  Instinctively, D
rew took a step back as the door flew open and Bob appeared, red-faced. “Mac. What’s up?” Bob’s typical bluster was laced with even more defensiveness than usual.

  “We’re heading to the pool. Wanna come?” Was that a flicker of relief on Bob’s face?

  “Who is it?” Sergeant Jones barked from inside.

  “Drew,” Bob shouted back.

  A momentary silence. “Jim McMahon’s boy? Tell that kid you’re busy.”

  Bob pursed his lips. “Thanks, but no thanks, Mac. Sorry.” Then he closed the door, not looking Drew in the eye.

  What the heck did the sergeant mean by that kid? Drew leaned against the closed door and tried to eavesdrop, but the voices inside had quieted.

  He crossed the landing back to his family’s apartment. “No dice, Mom,” Drew announced as he reentered. “We should probably go.”

  As he and his sisters tumbled out the building’s front door, gasping at the February chill and yanking on their mittens, Drew threw a furtive look toward the van. Two guys sat in the front, all bundled up, anything but inconspicuous. Heeding his mom’s order to not let on to Linda, he kept silent.

  But Linda smiled and waved—at the van!

  “Who . . . who are you waving at, sis?” he asked.

  “The men, silly. The men watching us.”

  Drew and Joyce stopped in their tracks, staring at their little sister.

  “They’re really nice,” Linda went on. “I was out walking Heidi with Patty, and Heidi bolted away from me. She can run faster than you think! One of those guys caught her for me.” She smiled. “He told me never to talk to other men who might try to catch Heidi, though. And I told him I knew better than to talk to strangers—I’m not a baby. And then Patty told me about a man trying to convince the daughter of a colonel to get into a car last year at the Grunewald. The MPs nabbed him—he was an East German spy! The MPs had been watching the colonel’s family because of some weird message he’d gotten from the KGB and because of how important the colonel is to the Berlin Brigade’s mission.” She looked up at Drew. “Guess Daddy’s really important now!”

  She skipped ahead. “Hurry up. Patty’s waiting for us!”

  Joyce looked at Drew with horror on her face.

  “Yeah, I know.” Drew nodded, grim. “Let’s not let Linda out of our sight for a while.” They hurried after her.

  Drew and Charlie came to a halt just outside the one-time Nazi compound that housed an indoor practice pool Hitler had built for the 1936 Olympics. They stared up at the twenty-­foot stone relief statues flanking the entrance. Charlie saluted and blew a raspberry.

  Shirley swatted him. “Quit it,” she teased.

  “Can’t help it. These guys get me every time.”

  The statues were of two muscular male athletes—one holding a sword, the other a discus—triple the height of real humans, totally naked, totally to scale, and totally anatomically correct.

  Linda’s new friend Patty elbowed her and whispered, “Ewww, that’s so gross.”

  Linda inched away from Drew and Charlie, suddenly horribly uncomfortable to be standing next to them.

  Gently, Joyce put her arm through Linda’s and pulled her close. “Thank goodness Bob isn’t here. Can you imagine what he’d say about those?” She nodded toward the equally impressive females nearby.

  Charlie snorted. “Bob does know some fascinating stuff, though. You know how these buildings were the headquarters for the SS during World War II?”

  Drew and Shirley nodded somberly. Military brats all knew about the infamous Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite Aryan corps most responsible for carrying out the Nazis’ horrifying “final solution” and notorious for brutal interrogations of downed Allied flyers.

  “Well, before the SS, this place was a military academy with lots of statues of German soldiers. The main gate was guarded by two massive ‘eternal corporals’ called Rottenführer.”

  “I’ve never seen those,” Drew commented.

  “That’s because—according to Bob—the statues were so solidly embedded in the gate’s columns that destroying them would’ve meant tearing down and rebuilding the entire entrance. So when the American Army took over the building, we just poured concrete over them to hide them. Now those pillars are full of cracks. Bob says locals claim it’s because the German spirit is trying to break free and rise again.”

  “How does Bob hear that kind of stuff?” Drew asked. His dad’s assets? Was that the right spy term?

  Charlie shrugged.

  “Well, I heard the ghosts that really haunt this place are the victims of the Night of the Long Knives,” said Shirley. “All those government bureaucrats and journalists who were rounded up and murdered here in this courtyard because they opposed Hitler. One of my dad’s men swears that at night, he hears a voice crying ‘Gib Acht.’ Beware!”

  They all stood in silence for a moment.

  “Hey, didn’t you say Matthias was coming with us today?”

  Drew winced, recognizing what had prompted Charlie to mention Matthias at that particular moment. “He didn’t show up,” Drew said, trying to sound unperturbed. In fact, he was worried that his cousin not showing was somehow connected with the envelope and the presence of those MPs. His head was filled with new suspicions after that conversation with his mom. If Matthias was such a believer, could he have been in on the KGB or Stasi attempt to recruit his dad? Drew ground his teeth at the thought.

  He started walking briskly to end the discussion and swim back into normal American teenage life, just an afternoon of hanging out with friends who had no weird walls of Cold War prejudice and paranoia standing between them. “Let’s go in. I’m freezing.”

  Charlie dove into the pool first, popped up, and treaded water. “Come on, girls,” he called. Linda and Patty were testing the water with their feet while hugging bleached-­white towels around themselves. “Last one in is a rotten egg! Make it be Drew!” He rolled over and freestyled away to lead the charge.

  Chuckling, Drew stalled on the starting block at his lane’s edge. Charlie—who had only older brothers—somehow knew there was no way Linda and Patty would drop their towels and dive in until he swam away to give them a little privacy. Charlie’s easy understanding of all sorts of people was one of the things that made him such a born leader. Like the majority of brats, Charlie was aiming for West Point and then a service career of his own. The difference was that Drew would unquestioningly follow Charlie into battle if he asked. A guy like Bob—not so much.

  Charlie’s strategy worked. Linda jumped in and waited for her friend to join her. Holding hands, they dunked themselves, giggling.

  Launching himself off the edge to plunge deep into the cool liquid, Drew let himself glide just below the surface for a few moments. He swept the water back in strokes like a bird’s wings beating. It was the closest feeling he could imagine to sliding through air, aloft. He lingered, shimmying through the watery weightlessness, until he thought his lungs would burst.

  Surfacing, he coughed and sucked in air. Turning on his back, he floated, looking up at the prism of skylights and the two-story, floor-to-ceiling windows that the frigid winter air had frosted in tiny patterns like cutout paper snowflakes. The musical echo of swimmers’ splash and surge, ricocheting off the glass, swirled in the air like the light steam rising off the heated water. It was an incredibly beautiful building for a pool. Drew wondered fleetingly about the Nazi athletes who had trained in it and whether Matthias’s brothers had ever swum in these waters.

  Then Drew rolled over and started to swim, slow, methodical, testing the flex and strength of his muscles. He would need to complete four hundred meters continuously, two lengths of the fifty-meter pool for each stroke—back, breast, butterfly, free—to earn his lifesaving badge.

  He and Charlie passed each other mid-lap several times before they ended up holding on to the same wal
l, breathing hard, just shy of the eight laps that made up four hundred meters.

  “Next week I’ll make it,” puffed Charlie.

  “Me too. Just gotta build up to it,” heaved Drew.

  “You were making some pretty decent time. If we’d started at the same moment, you’d have beaten me,” Charlie complimented. “What sport are you going to do in the spring?”

  “Track.”

  “Me too!” Charlie did a back push-up to lift himself onto the pool’s edge, making a puddle as his trunks drained. “You know, Bob is a pole-vaulter. And stellar in shot put. He’ll be on the team, too.”

  Drew groaned.

  Charlie laughed. “Aww, c’mon. Quality time with your nemesis!”

  “You know, the weirdest thing just happened with Bob,” Drew began, but he stopped short with a sudden realization. The van. His mom’s fear that the MPs might be keeping a log on his dad as well as a protective eye on the family. Sergeant Jones worked in intelligence. God almighty. Drew caught his breath. How had he not seen it earlier? He’d just experienced a shunning. Bob’s dad didn’t want him to be around Jim McMahon’s boy—that kid—until command knew for sure that Drew’s dad wasn’t a traitor.

  “What weird thing?” Charlie asked. “You okay, man?”

  “Yeah,” Drew muttered. Would Charlie want to keep his distance, too, if Drew told him about the van and Sergeant Jones? “It’s . . . it’s nothing. Just thinking.”

  “Suit yourself, buddy. But you know I’m all ears if you need to think aloud.” Charlie gazed across the pool to the deep end, where Joyce skip-bounced off the diving platform to soar, arms outstretched, before bowing forward to flip herself into a pointed-toe arrow, piercing the water with barely a sound.

  “Wow. Where did she learn that?” Charlie murmured.

  Where did Joyce learn anything, Drew thought. It was almost as if she could do everything she attempted from the get-go. “She just went to the pool in Arlington every day last summer.”

  Charlie sighed, long and wistful. The guy had it bad. “Think she’d ever compete as a diver, like that East German girl who just won the gold medals?” he asked.