Walls

by L. M. Elliott

  Encouraged, Joyce kept singing, louder now, pulling Fritz and Drew around her in a circle. “When that shark bites with his teeth, babe . . .”

  The whole thing was ridiculous, thought Drew, like they’d been dropped into a movie musical or something. But he had to admit it was pretty amazing to watch Joyce’s effusiveness spill into the station like sunshine, lighting up weary souls in that once-grand, now-dingy place.

  Amid the crowd, Drew picked out Matthias, waiting at the prearranged meeting spot. He was leaning against the wall and copping a gigantic attitude, like he’d done at the Victory Column the first day Drew had met him. Drew started to wave, but Matthias looked away, searching the station furtively, pushing his collar up around his face. Then, he pulled down the brim of his flat cap and didn’t move until Joyce nearly crashed into him while doing a pirouette and singing.

  “Fancy gloves, oh, wears old Macheath, babe, so there’s never—oh!” Joyce stopped abruptly. “Matthias?”

  “Freundschaft!” Matthias fairly shouted.

  A look of anger flared across Fritz’s face at the sound of the FDJ greeting.

  But Joyce just reached out to pull Matthias’s collar back from his face and burbled, “Friendship? Friendship, yourself!” and burst out laughing.

  Lo and behold, so did Matthias.

  As they settled into their posh, red-upholstered seats in the balcony—which gave the illusion of being held aloft by enormous marble muses that looked a lot like the statues at Hitler’s pool for master-race swimmers—Drew couldn’t help but note how bizarrely opulent the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm was. Given that it was the favorite playhouse of the GDR’s communist culture bureau, anyway.

  They were great seats—one of Cousin Marta’s doctor friends had given her the four tickets. “Why didn’t your mom use these herself?” Joyce asked Matthias.

  “She knows I like Brecht more than she does. And she wants us to be friends, not just cousins.” Matthias shrugged and changed the subject. “Why were you singing American words to ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer’? Were you making the words up?”

  Joyce looked at Matthias in surprise. “No, it’s the English translation. There’s an off-Broadway production of Threepenny Opera that’s been running for years now. I think it’s even broken the record held by Oklahoma for most performances. The song ‘Mack the Knife’ is a big hit. Even Frank Sinatra sings it.”

  Matthias looked bewildered. “But . . . this is Brecht’s attack on capitalism. The exploitation of the poor. How is it playing in the United States, where the common man is put under the boot?”

  “You see?” Fritz said, raising his eyebrows at Joyce. “This is the propaganda the GDR fills young East German heads with.” He turned to Matthias. “How? It’s called artistic freedom—that’s how. Freedom of speech. Any kind of play can be staged in the United States, even if it’s disliked by the ruling class, those”—Fritz made his voice growly—“greedy capitalists.’ ” He paused. “And that’s how it should be here in Germany.”

  Joyce elbowed Fritz, who rolled his eyes but eased up. “You know who did improvise lyrics to ‘Mack the Knife’?” he asked. “Ella Fitzgerald. When she sang here in Berlin in the Deutschlandhalle last year. She forgot the lyrics, so she started scatting and imitating Louis Armstrong. That’s freedom—to ad-lib, to imagine. To not be terrified of making mistakes or of being punished for not spitting back prescribed words. Her improv was brilliant. She was brilliant. Did you go to that concert?”

  Matthias shook his head. “Who is Ella Fitzgerald?”

  “Oh man.” Fritz grinned. “She’s only one of the greatest jazz singers alive! Okay, let me raise the Iron Curtain an inch, for you, anyway, Herr Freundschaft. I will take us all to the Plänterwald Jazz Café next month. I play piano there sometimes. In April, they will host a hot Scandinavian jazz combo that I want to hear. You will come.” He patted Matthias on the back. Then he looked at Drew. “And you can bring . . .” He looked to Joyce. “What is the name of the girl you told me of?”

  “Shirley,” Matthias answered for Joyce. Then, looking at Drew, he deadpanned, “But this I cannot school you in.”

  Even Drew had to laugh at that.

  After the performance, the foursome headed to Matthias’s house. They’d promised Drew’s mom that they’d say hello to Aunt Hilde. “What did you think of Brecht?” Matthias asked excitedly as they walked. “Did you like it?”

  “It . . . the German was a little hard for me to follow,” Drew equivocated, unsure of what he actually did think about the searing satire of the West. But seeing Matthias’s disappointment, he added politely, “I liked it, though.”

  “I loooooved it!” Joyce exclaimed. “Thank you so much for taking us, Matthias. The music was amazing. So biting . . . so disturbing. Like nothing I’ve ever heard before.”

  “Yes!” Matthias lit up at her response. “Brecht wished to disturb. He believed theater must expose class struggle. To make comment that can inspire society to change. To Brecht, art just to entertain was a waste of time. It is even . . . mmmm . . . amoralisch.”

  Amoral.

  “And yet,” Drew couldn’t help saying, “you like Elvis.”

  “Elvis?” Fritz nearly shouted in surprise. “There is hope for you, then, Herr Freundschaft!”

  But Matthias’s smile froze. His gaze darted up and down the street as he hurried to unlock the massive door to his house and hustle them upstairs.

  Inside, Aunt Hilde was sitting on a faded brocade settee, awaiting them. But at the sight of Fritz, she gasped and bolted toward her bedroom.

  Matthias sighed and looked at the floor.

  Cousin Marta was working the night shift at the hospital, so Joyce took it upon herself to coax their great-aunt out. Wrapping her arm around the frail lady’s shoulders, she explained that Fritz was her sweetheart and that they wanted to tell her all about the operetta. “It was so amazing, Aunt Hilde. I am hoping to learn some of the songs the character Polly sings,” Joyce explained in German.

  Aunt Hilde smiled as Joyce talked. Within minutes, she, Joyce, and Fritz were in a musicians’ huddle, fervently discussing the Threepenny Opera’s music and the enormous challenges it presented for the singers and pit orchestra.

  Bored, Mathias yawned and motioned for Drew to follow him. The boys retreated to Matthias’s small bedroom—a long, narrow room with one skinny window at the end. Shelves ran along the length of one wall, and a narrow cot and a clothes rack strewn with everything Matthias owned lined the other. Remembering that the GDR had forced Aunt Hilde, Cousin Marta, and Matthias to give up an entire floor of their home to another family in a state-­ordered “redistribution of wealth,” Drew wondered if the tiny room had originally been an oversized linen closet for his once-aristocratic Becker relatives.

  Matthias pulled a string hanging from the bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling to throw gray light onto them.

  “Whoa, look at all your books!” Drew breathed. Goethe, Keist, Hölderlin, Schiller. “Mom has some of these.”

  “My grandmother’s books. She hides them here because they are now verboten, condemned by the Party. They are filled with characters who grow from what you call psychology—individual . . . mmmm . . . Offenbarungen.” He paused.

  “Epiphanies.”

  Matthias nodded. “Changed from e-pi-phi-nies, not social transformation. These works do not reflect the impact and nobility of a new and more humane society.”

  “Seriously?” Drew asked.

  Matthias refused to return his gaze. Drew looked back to the shelves. “Hey!” He reached out to tip forward the paperback copy of Orwell’s Animal Farm he’d given Matthias for Christmas. The pages had definitely been thumbed and turned. A few were even dog-eared. “Did your mother read this?” he asked quietly. Drew’s mom would be thrilled if she had. “Did . . . did you?”

  “I find the portrait of Boxe
r to be over-simple,” Matthias murmured.

  Carefully, Drew asked, “You mean the old plow horse?”

  When Matthias didn’t answer, Drew kept prodding. “The character that literally works himself to death for the new socialist state that he believes in no matter what obvious lies or cruel things the Party leaders do? Even when they send him to be killed in the glue factory because he is no longer useful?”

  Frowning, Matthias simply pointed to a row of crisp new books. “This is what my school gives me. Dmitri Saves Two German Children. How the Steel Was Tempered, by Nikolai Ostrovsky. Anna Seghers’s The Seventh Cross. That one is good. A thriller. About prisoners escaping a Nazi concentration camp and the torture planned by the commandant when they are recaptured.”

  Drew knew this was the kind of “intel” Bob wanted, but suddenly, all he really cared about was how this stuff affected his cousin. “Is it hard for you to read books like that, about what the Nazis did?”

  Without the hesitation Drew expected, Matthias answered, “Yes. Very hard to read about the persecution of German communists by Hitler’s fascist Reich. But they were martyrs for the cause of socialism.”

  “No, I mean . . . in general. As a German. Because of all the peoples Hitler ordered exterminated—the Jews, the Slavs, the disabled. Knowing that German people carried out those murders.”

  Matthias blinked and frowned. “Not all Germans. Here in the East, they resisted Hitler and his Nazis. The fascists were in the West. Those Germans were influenced by the French and British, whose greed and sense of entitlement and nationalistic arrogance spread across our border like a plague. Those Germans became fascists and let Hitler come to power and then followed him.”

  Drew was dumbfounded. Matthias couldn’t really believe that, could he? Was that how the Russians had won the unquestioning allegiance of East Germans—by convincing them they’d been victims and not participants in Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust?

  A heavy silence rose up like a wall between them.

  After a long moment of avoiding his astonished stare, Matthias scootched past Drew in the narrow space and went to a small desk crammed under the window. He switched on a desk lamp and reached underneath to pull out a box jammed with 45s—Little Richard, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Pat Boone, Bill Haley, the Drifters.

  Again, Drew was astounded. It was a stash of Western contraband that would land Matthias in serious scheiße if he were caught. “Where in the world did you get all those?”

  “Trading. Looking in the trash in the West.” Matthias paused, then added in a hushed voice, “I know someone who goes to record stores in West Berlin to listen to demo discs. He takes them to the clerk and says they are scratched and skipping. The clerks—the foolish ones—throw the samples out. Then, later, he retrieves them from the bin. He used to trade with me.” Matthias rifled through his cache to pull out “Rockin’ Robin” by Bobby Day.

  “Hey, I have that single, too. Although I can’t seem to find it.”

  “It’s yours,” Matthias murmured.

  “What? What the hell, man?”

  Matthias held out the 45 and bowed his head as Drew snatched it from him. Remembering his missing toothpaste and acne medicine the night of Sadie Hawkins, Drew snapped, “Did you steal any more of my things?”

  Matthias took a deep breath. “No other records. Just that one. I am very sorry. I was going to return it to you last month when we were to swim. But I could not come.”

  Rage boiled up in Drew. “What’s wrong with you, man? And why didn’t you come swimming that day, anyway?”

  Matthias dropped down on his bed and leaned over, covering his face with his hands. “The FDJ summoned me to a tribunal. For a Selbstkritik. To give self-criticism.”

  As furious as he was, Drew was so completely taken aback by how miserable Matthias sounded that he remained quiet and let Matthias explain.

  “My time with you has been . . . noticed. That is why I was afraid when I met you in the train station tonight. I was reported to the FDJ. They said my attitude was suspect and they wanted to test my sincerity.” He looked up at Drew. “This, after I won the Gold Medal for Good Knowledge last year. Do you know how hard that is to achieve?” He shook his head in disbelief.

  After a moment, Matthias continued, “The Jugendfreund questioned me. As judges. They are—were—my friends.” He ran his hands through his mop of blond hair before hanging his head and looking at the floor. “They said my hair was a mess, a sign of”—he paused and made quotation marks in the air—“ ‘an amoral, bourgeois disregard for the seriousness of learning and working-class dignity.’ Having pimples”—he tugged on his collar self-consciously to hide an outbreak—“did not ‘show the cleanliness expected of FDJ members.’ Chewing on my fingernails”—he stuck his hands in his pockets—“suggested I am ‘sly and untrustworthy.’ ”

  He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “They said I endanger our righteous cause, and that I bring your imperialism and unclean thinking into our country. They were going to expel me from the FDJ unless I repented and confessed.”

  “Confessed to what?”

  “Kulturbarbarei. Being corrupted by Americans. Your music. The evil virus coming from the West.” He suddenly burst into unnervingly sharp, gallows-humor laughter. “Saying it aloud makes it sound . . .”

  “Insane?”

  Matthias nodded, a rueful smile on his face. He gazed out the window a moment and parroted, “ ‘For the fatherland, no duty is too hard, no sacrifice too great.’ ”

  “Do you really believe that?” Drew asked.

  Matthias shrugged, still staring into the night outside. “I believe in purging unfairness from society. Ending poverty. I believe in Marx’s philosophy: from each according to his talents, to each according to his needs. But this?” He looked down at his chewed-up, FDJ-condemned fingernails, thinking.

  Drew struggled to figure out what to say. “You know, in the West, there is a polish you can put on your nails that tastes so bitter it will stop you from chewing on them.”

  “What?” Matthias looked back up, surprised. “Of course there is.” After a moment, a mischievous—even mutinous—look filled his eyes. He checked his watch. Then, from under his bed, he pulled a bright orange, hand-sized transistor radio. “The signal is clearest now. Best time to tune in.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Trash bins in the West provide many treasures.” Matthias wiggled his eyebrows playfully. “The antenna is broken in half. But it works by the window.”

  Snapping the small radio on, Matthias spun the dial, raised the truncated straw-like antenna, and propped it on the sill.

  AFN, the American Forces Network, crackled into the room.

  Goooooood evening, Berlin! Here’s a brand-new record that’s sweeping folks off their feet all over the United States, and boy oh boy, is it a toe-tapper. Maybe your sweethearts have already written to you about it. It’s sure to be another dance sensation—‘Pony Time’ by Chubby Checker!

  Bouncy music replaced the announcer’s voice as the singer famous for “The Twist” sang out his latest hit: It’s pony time! Get up!

  As Checker’s backup singers pattered in quick time—Boogety, boogety, boogety, shoo—Matthias jumped up and started following the song’s instructions. You turn to the left when I say gee, you turn to the right when I say haw.

  At first dancing on his toes to be as quiet as possible, Matthias still gyrated with a recklessness that stunned Drew. It was more than a kid’s war dance of defiance. There was a despair on his face, too, that Drew instinctively recognized—the soul-rattling anger and disappointment a teenager feels when his heroes reveal themselves to be full of baloney, or even to be villains.

  His frenzy growing, Matthias started stomping. “C’mon!” he shouted, laughing wildly.

  This was dangerously loud—even Drew knew
that. But he got up and did a rendition of the twist to keep his cousin company, even though Drew could tell it was almost as if he wasn’t in the room. Matthias was completely absorbed in his own shake, rattle, and roll of disobedience. Unhinged in the best way.

  After a few moments, the door flew open, and Joyce was shushing them. “Drew! Stop! The neighbors. People in the street might hear you. You’ll get Matthias in big trouble.” She looked to Fritz for help. “Tell them!”

  But Fritz nodded in approval of the brash musical rebellion and slipped past her to join in, whooping.

  Behind Joyce stood Aunt Hilde, wide-eyed but smiling, tapping her foot in rhythm.

  The song ended. Whoo-eee. That’s sure to be on its way to number one. That’s Chubby Checker, folks! I’ll be back with more after the break.

  Winded, Drew, Matthias, and Fritz stood panting, grinning, eyeing one another, triumphant and unapologetic, like boys who’d gotten away with a tremendous prank against a cruel headmaster. Then Matthias turned off the radio. Suddenly he looked scared. Really scared.

  “Time for us to go, boys.” Joyce motioned for her brother and her boyfriend to exit quickly. “Maybe nobody heard—or they don’t know which house it was coming from,” she reassured Drew.

  As they said good night and moved toward the staircase, Drew turned back to Matthias, standing in his doorway. “I’ll lend you more 45s, if you want,” he said.

  But Matthias shook his head vehemently, pointed down the steps, and abruptly shut the door.

  Trotting up the stairs toward them was the teenager with one blue eye and one brown, whose family lived on the top floor of Matthias’s home—the one who’d hailed Matthias with Freundschaft. The boy Cousin Marta had told Drew’s mom she suspected of being a Stasi informant.

  Drew felt his blood run cold. The youth was wearing a tracksuit with the German Olympic team’s insignia, just like the ones Drew’s mom had described the GDR giving as rewards to its teenage fanatics who destroyed TV antennas turned to the West. Could he be the “friend” who’d ratted on Matthias to the FDJ?