Walls

by L. M. Elliott

  “Hey, how did you know that whatchacallit, that lip dance?” Bob asked Matthias over the music. “And what that Russkie was saying?”

  “The Lipsi. It is taught at FDJ meetings,” Matthias explained. “And we learn Russian in school.” He seemed to brace for yet another confrontation.

  But Bob just nodded. “Well, it sure saved our butts. My butt. Thanks, man.” Leaning back in his chair, Bob looked around the room. “Think that Fräulein would be interested in a dance?” He tipped his head toward a young blond in a dark sweater and capri pants, left alone at her table as all her friends, paired up, took to the floor. “She looks like she’s going stag, like me.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a great idea,” Drew began, but Bob was already on his feet. He sauntered over and chatted with the girl for a few moments before doing a thumbs-up at Drew and sitting down next to her.

  “Maybe it’ll be okay,” Shirley said. “He can be charming when he wants to be.” She leaned her head on Drew’s shoulder. “Like you.”

  At that, Drew completely forgot about Bob. He could have been carried off by a platoon of Vopos, and Drew wouldn’t have noticed.

  Matthias kept watch, though. For almost twenty minutes, through three different songs, Bob appeared to be talking cordially, respectfully, with the girl. Then her friends returned to the table. And within moments, everything changed.

  “Time to go!” Matthias stood abruptly and quickly threaded his way through the dancing bodies to get to Bob.

  Drew pulled Shirley to her feet and darted over to Joyce and Fritz. “Trouble,” he said. “C’mon!”

  They flanked Bob just as one of the young men leaned into him, swearing in German, calling him an imperialist pig, among other coarser slurs.

  This could get ugly fast.

  Yet again, Matthias took control. “The S-Bahn closes soon,” he announced, yanking Bob to his feet. “You and your American friends must go home now.” He nodded at the table and rolled his eyes, as if he agreed it was time for these infuriating Americans to get lost. “Auf Wiedersehen, Freunde.” Then he hustled Bob toward the door as quickly as possible, Drew helping to shove him along from behind. A fanfare of jazz escaped with them as they burst through the café’s doors and tumbled into the street.

  “What the hell?” Bob exclaimed. “I was actually being nice that time. Honest.”

  “East Germans have been told for years that you Americans and NATO are going to invade us any day,” said Matthias. “The surprise attack your JFK just ordered on Cuba—the incident they call the Bay of Pigs—confirms our fears. The Russians have filled our newspapers and radio with it. They make fun of your defeat, and at the same time, they say you are coming here next.”

  “But,” Bob protested, “Russia started it by backing Castro and setting up another communist puppet regime, but this one just a hundred miles off our mainland!”

  “It does not matter.” Matthias shrugged. “Khrushchev uses your Cuba invasion as proof that you want to destroy worker states. Also, talking to that girl, you . . .you hit a nerve?” He looked to Drew once again for affirmation of his word choice.

  Drew nodded to confirm that was an American saying.

  “Since World War II, many German women have chosen American men over our countrymen. To date. To marry. To defect to the West.”

  “But I was just talking to her!” Bob said, shaking his head. “I wasn’t trying to snake her. I was trying to make up for being a jackass before. Doing what they train us army brats to do—make nice with the locals!” He straightened to attention and saluted, saluted, saluted, like a windup toy soldier. “I am a young ambassador of goodwill.” He looked at Drew. “Remember the pamphlet they gave you when you got to Berlin?”

  Drew couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, man.” He straightened and mimicked Bob’s salute. “Ambassadors all!”

  Joyce and Shirley joined in, reciting, “ ‘Well-mannered children can be a tremendous help in showing foreign men and woman American ideals and democracy’s way of life.’ ”

  “Oh, oh! What about this one?” Drew added. “ ‘Do not be arrogant or rude, but help teach democracy to Germans who question it with informal discussions and patient explanations.’ ”

  The foursome laughed, but Fritz and Matthias remained totally baffled.

  Bob clapped Matthias on the back. “It’s an army brat thing. Take it from me—for once, I was just being a nice guy.” He looked to Drew. “I told you, being a nice guy gets you nowhere.”

  The café door swung open again, and one of the blond Fräulein’s friends planted his feet at the threshold and crossed his arms to glare at them, seeming to aim most of his stare-down at Matthias.

  “I must go,” Matthias muttered. “Thank you.” He shook Fritz’s hand. “I liked the jazz.” With that, he turned and evaporated into the shadows of the barely lit streets of East Berlin without saying goodbye.

  Drew sighed. “Just when I start to really trust that guy, he does something that makes me wonder . . .” He trailed off, looking back and forth between the guy in the café doorway and his retreating cousin. But this time, his suspiciousness turned into concern for Matthias. Could those Germans they’d just encountered be Stasi or FDJ fanatics? How much surveillance was Matthias really under? Come to think of it, Matthias had never said what the outcome of that horrifying tribunal had been before he’d gone into his wild war dance to Chubby Checker. And there hadn’t been a chance that night at the Plänterwald for the cousins to really talk.

  Bob had watched Matthias disappear, too. “I think he’s A-OK, actually.” He studied Drew for a moment, uncharacteristically hesitant. “I think . . . there’s something I should tell you. I think you’ve pinned something on Matthias that wasn’t—”

  “Later,” Fritz interrupted. The rest of the blond girl’s gang had just exploded out the door, pushing up their sleeves. “We need to go. Now!”

  “Scheiße!” Drew grabbed Shirley’s hand, and they sprinted after Fritz and Joyce, who laughed uproariously in a strange mixture of defiance, adrenaline, and exuberance.

  “Move! Move! Move!” Bob shouted, bringing up the rear.

  It took two long, scary blocks before the Germans gave up their chase. But Drew, Shirley, Joyce, Fritz, and Bob didn’t stop running until they reached the nearest S-Bahn.

  Then—after they hurled themselves onto a train and its doors slammed shut and he fell into a seat with her—Shirley kissed him.

  In their rush to the station, there had been no time for Drew to ask Bob what he’d meant about Matthias. But the one question he really cared about at that moment had been answered.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MAY

  1961

  “Listen, son.” Sergeant McMahon reached across the front seat and put his hand on Drew’s shoulder as he opened the car door. “Be careful on this trip, okay? Tomorrow is May Day, so we’re in for a lot of chest-beating from our commie neighbors.” He thumped his own chest. “Da! International Workers Day. Parades! Tanks! Missiles! Our handsome comrade soldiers marching and singing. Da! Is good!”

  “I know, Dad,” Drew answered with a laugh. He watched Charlie get out of his family’s car and trot toward the school bus waiting to drive them to the station. Their track team was headed for the military duty train that would take them through the Soviet occupation zone that encircled Berlin to a meet in Frankfurt. “I better go. Don’t worry—we’ll be in West Germany by the time all that baloney starts.”

  “Sure. But for six hours, your train moves through commie territory before you reach our American zone. And tonight, on the eve of May Day, every Russian and GDR soldier along the rail line will be jazzed to show his superiors that he’s the most patriotic communist. Being stacked on top of each other in a locked-down train for that many hours is asking a lot of self-control from you guys—I get it. But”—his dad held up a finger—“tonight
’s not the night for goofing off. Got it?”

  Drew nodded.

  His dad patted his shoulder. “Good luck in Frankfurt, son. I know you’ll come back with lots of blue ribbons.”

  “Yes, sir!” Drew pulled the door handle but stopped halfway out of the car. “Hey, Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “A couple of the guys have to be really careful about their paperwork, because the Russians know who their dads are. I heard one kid got pulled off the train last year because he’s a junior and his dad’s name was on a list of CIA operatives to nab.” Drew swallowed, anxious. “I know it’s been four months now, but that envelope left on the Bonneville . . .”

  Waving his hand, Drew’s dad answered quickly, “Don’t give that damn envelope another thought. The higher-ups are convinced it was a fishing expedition. Or a one-off—a quick way to discredit a good American patriot.” He pointed his thumb at himself. “Like yours truly. The Stasi and KGB do that all the time, just to spread doubt about an American officer’s integrity. They want to fuel suspicion within the brigade, to weaken our trust in one another, which ultimately weakens the unit. They’ve wrecked a couple of guys’ reputations just by leaving little love notes like that one. The SOBs.”

  He patted Drew’s shoulder. “It’s easy for them to target Americans who have some connection in the East. Maybe someone tipped off the KGB or Stasi to the fact we’re related to Matthias, Marta, and Hilde. In any case, the Russkies and their GDR flunkies went after the wrong fish with me.”

  “But, Dad, the guys in the van—”

  “Wasted their time—even though I’m grateful that they looked after my family until we knew everything was all clear. They didn’t detect any kind of follow-up to that envelope.” His dad nodded toward the parking lot. “Looks like everyone’s getting on the bus. Better hurry, son.”

  “Okay. If you say so.”

  “I do.” Sergeant McMahon gave Drew the reassuring smile he always used to signal that a subject was closed.

  Nodding dutifully, Drew got out and darted across the parking lot. His dad’s comment that someone might have tipped off the secret police that they had cousins in East Berlin had landed like a grenade in his mind, rekindling his old paranoia about how that envelope had ended up on their Bonneville. The people most likely to have reported that his family had East Berlin cousins were FDJ believers, like Matthias’s antenna-breaking neighbor or one of the supposed “Freunde” on that tribunal. Or . . . maybe someone who’d been reprimanded, accused of not being enough of a believer, someone desperate to prove he or she was a good and loyal socialist . . . like . . . like Matthias? Drew felt sick as that particular distrust resurfaced.

  The only thing that was crystal clear was the fact that Drew’s dad had dodged a bullet that could have killed his military career.

  “Nice of you to join us, McMahon,” Coach said as Drew bounded up the bus steps.

  “Sorry, sir,” Drew murmured.

  As the bus drove the short distance to the Army Rail Traffic Office, the coach walked down the aisle, collecting passports and flag orders. “Okay, boys, hand them over.” He took a quick look at each student’s official paperwork.

  The flag orders were specific to the trip, issued in English, Russian, and German, detailing each student’s purpose for traveling and reflecting all the stops the train would make through the night. Any typo or flaw in the translation between the three languages could get a kid yanked off the train at Soviet Russian checkpoints. The train itself might be sovereign U.S. territory, but the track it traveled and the steam engine that pulled it through the Russian zone belonged to the East Germans.

  After shuffling through the documents, the coach stuffed them into a big envelope to hand to the train’s commander when they boarded. “Listen, guys—tonight, the train will be jammed with family dependents and officers. That means six guys per sleeping compartment. Every berth in the train’s three sleeper cars is assigned. I can’t spread you out this trip. Sorry.”

  The boys groaned. When all six bunks were pulled down from the walls, the compartment was left with a middle aisle the width of maybe one and a half skinny bodies and the length of a bed. With quarters that tight, it would be a tall order for six guys to stay out of each other’s way and out of trouble.

  “Hey, now,” Charlie called out. “Blackjack is better with more players, anyway—if anyone is up to the challenge of playing me.”

  Bob snickered. “You’re on.”

  It didn’t take more than fifteen minutes before Drew felt like a sardine in a can. Especially since he’d ended up in a compartment with Bob and his gang—Gary, Larry, and Steve. Thank goodness Charlie was in with them.

  “Pheeeeew-weee! Man, put your shoes back on!” Bob griped to the group.

  “You mean these?” Larry picked up Gary’s putrid sneakers and tossed them to Steve, who tried to chuck them at Charlie, but the shoes ended up bouncing off Bob.

  “Hey! Cool it, pops!” Bob gave Steve a playful shove, which knocked him into Larry, who fell onto Gary, which somehow took all four of them down into a wrestling heap in the tiny aisle between the pull-down bunks.

  In a tangle, they arose, Bob’s butt sliding along the compartment’s window. His backside squashed against the glass, Bob pushed the other boys away from him. “Hey, anyone up for mooning the commies?” he crowed.

  Steve had Gary in a headlock, rubbing his skull to mess up his hair, when the head MP appeared, passenger checklist in hand. “Anyone who sticks their bare buns up against that window will find them cooked,” he growled. “Understood?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Bob replied. “Sorry, Sergeant. Just messing around. You know how it is.”

  “Yes, we do,” said the train commander, who’d sidled up behind the MP and now stood in the doorway as well. The lieutenant warned, “Gentlemen, I’ve been in charge of your teams during these crossings for a couple of months now. I’ve seen all your tricks. I expect you to straighten up and fly right—you’re representing the United States of America.”

  “Yes, sir,” the six murmured.

  “Pull the shade down, now. We’re about to depart,” he instructed. “Remember, no looking out the window—that’s our deal with the Russians as we pass through their zone.” He rapped his knuckle against the instructions posted on the cabin’s wall. “No photos, and no conversation with Soviet and GDR guards during the trip. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m counting on you, boys.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Try to get some sleep. You want to be well rested for your meet tomorrow. Show those boys in Frankfurt what you’re made of.”

  As soon as the officer moved away to the next compartment, Bob snorted. “What a Boy Scout.”

  Charlie and Drew exchanged an eye roll. The lieutenant was young, obviously a little green and still idealistic. Nothing like their seasoned veteran fathers. Even so, the guy was in command, and Drew respected that.

  Drew considered Bob a moment. Hopefully, the Bob who’d gone with them to the jazz café—the Bob who could be cordial and honest, even diplomatic—would win out over the version that itched to make trouble. If not, they were all in for a long night.

  At that very moment, Larry farted loudly. Bob answered with a trumpet blast of his own.

  Drew sighed. A long night, for sure.

  Thirty minutes later, the train lurched into Potsdam—the edge of the American sector. It ground to a halt, belching steam, straddling the line between the city’s free zones and forty-two thousand square miles of communist-controlled country.

  Tweeeeeeeet. Tweeeeeeet. KA-THUNK. Clang, clang, clang.

  Engine change.

  The boys quieted as the American locomotive that had been pulling their train detached and chugged away onto a side rail, its warning whistles and bells screaming, its engineer shouting out the window
.

  After a few minutes came an answering clang-clang-clang. BUMP. Hissssssssssssssss. Their train shuddered as an East German engine backed into it and locked on, spitting steam.

  Drew had taken the duty train several times. But his stomach still flip-flopped at the sound of the train coupling. He and his teammates would be traveling for hours through communist territory, pulled by a communist engine, policed and surrounded by communist officials. Add to that surreal situation the strict orders not to look out the windows or to talk to anyone, and any guy who said he wasn’t weirded out by it all was lying.

  German voices trickled down the narrow corridor as the East German crew boarded and the conductor asked his West German counterpart for the train’s passenger list. The lieutenant and his English-Russian translator stepped off the train, stood on the platform right next to Drew’s car, and spoke to the Soviet station chief and his interpreter. Their tone was oddly cordial.

  Knowing they’d be sitting for a while as their documents were verified and the Soviet officer signed off with the lieutenant, the boys just couldn’t help themselves. One after another, they peeped around the shade. Russian soldiers with rifles held at the ready walked up and down the length of the train, peering underneath the carriage, checking the wheels, as if the Americans had tucked contraband into the train’s crevices.

  “Dammit,” Bob muttered as he lingered at the window, his face half hidden by the shade. “When’s the lieutenant going to head into the station house? I have cigarettes to trade with the Russkies for their red star insignias.”

  “Don’t you have a bunch of those already, Bob?” Charlie asked.

  “Yeah, but the more the better. I can get a lot for those things back home.”

  From his top bunk, Bob leaned over and grabbed the window handle, pulling it open a few inches. “Psssst,” he hissed at a Russian soldier below.

  “U vas yest’ Amerikanskiye sigarety?” a voice answered from below.