Walls

by L. M. Elliott

  “Mein Schatz.” Cousin Marta, clad in frayed silk pajamas, rushed to Matthias and took his hand.

  My treasure. Drew had never before heard her call his cousin by that German endearment.

  Behind her in the doorway was Drew’s dad. In uniform. In the middle of the night. A sidearm was strapped at his hip.

  “Dad—what’s going on?”

  “Grab your gear and come out into the living room, Drew,” Sergeant McMahon insisted. “Hurry.”

  Nervously stuffing his belongings into his backpack, Drew followed Matthias into the parlor. Matthias reached to turn on a lamp, but Drew’s dad stopped him, saying, “Better not let the Vopos know we’re awake.”

  “Vopos?” Drew and Matthias cried out together.

  “Son.” Drew’s dad took him by the shoulders. “The Russians are closing Berlin’s border. Our southern outpost alerted headquarters that they were seeing massive columns of Russian tanks and infantry moving in to ring the city. I left to come get you as soon as I heard and had a hell of a time getting through. There are thousands of Vopos and militia—even firemen armed with machine guns—guarding workers who are rolling out concertina wire along the sector line. Truckloads of it. They’re moving fast. I’ve got to get you out.”

  Drew’s father turned to Matthias. “Come with us. I doubt you’ll be able to leave once this barrier is up.”

  Matthias took a step back. “No!” he almost shouted. “It cannot be true.”

  “Mein Schatz,” his mother began, her voice quavering.

  Snnnnnnap!

  They all startled as the radio suddenly began to blare, loud with triumphant march music, Prussian drums and cymbals crashing. Aunt Hilde had silently slipped into the room. Her white hair cascaded to her waist, and she clutched a cream-colored shawl around her throat with one hand while the other rested on the enormous 1940s radio console. Standing like that, she looked to Drew like one of those ghostly Valkyrie warrior spirits that warned of death during a battle. He shuddered.

  A proclamation from the Warsaw Pact to our brothers and comrades, the Deutschlandsender announcer brayed and Drew translated to himself. Our brave Volksarmee soldiers are at this moment securing our sector border. They do this to protect all East Germans from the warmongers in the West, who scheme against us. East Berliners will no longer be subjected to the degradation and deterioration of capitalism. By morning, you will be safe from NATO and its fascists. Remain calm. Rejoice. Soon, red flags will flutter across all of Germany.

  Aunt Hilde turned off the radio, trembling. “Die Ivans, Sie kommen,” she murmured. Then she hung her head and began to sway, moaning quietly.

  Tenderly, Cousin Marta took Matthias’s face in her hands. “You must go. This will be nothing but a prison now. Go with Drew.”

  Matthias shook his head vehemently.

  Drew joined in her plea. “C’mon, Matthias. Come with Dad and me. I . . . I know you believed in the socialist utopia—the ideal of complete equality. I respect that, man. But your workers break their backs for a state that abuses them. It’s just . . . just like Animal Farm. You don’t want to live in a place where your best friend would rat on you to the Party because of your taste in music . . . do you?”

  Matthias stared at Drew, hesitating.

  “Liebling,” Cousin Marta whispered. “Bitte. I want you to grow up to be whatever you wish to be. To speak what you believe. To not live in fear. You must go.”

  “Not without you.”

  “I cannot go,” his mother murmured, anguished.

  “Why?” Matthias stepped back. “Because of her?” He pointed at his grandmother.

  Cousin Marta reached for her son, pulling him to her, her lips against his blond head as she spoke urgently. “I cannot. You know what they would do to your grandmother if I left her. They have no tolerance for people who suffer as she does.”

  “I won’t go, then. We can go later, together. After . . .” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “After she’s gone.”

  “Mein Schatz, please. I did not make your brothers leave when there was still a chance for them. And they died. Trapped. Please. Leaving with Drew and his father is likely your only hope.”

  “They are still letting Allied army vehicles through,” Drew’s dad confirmed. “But I was stopped at every corner. Threatened a couple of times, which took some nerve. They’ve never dared to do that with an American officer before. We may have to make a run for it through a gap in the barbed wire before it’s secured. But we need to hurry. I think they’re going to have the whole border locked down by dawn.”

  Matthias wrenched himself away from his mother. “Not without you, Mutti!” he cried. “Why do you always choose her over me?” He looked toward his grandmother and crumpled to the floor in tears.

  “Matthias!” Cousin Marta gasped, and knelt beside her son. “Listen to me. Listen. You live because of her. And only because of her. I should have told you before. But . . . I . . . I wanted to spare you. Spare myself from remembering.” She took a deep breath. “When the Russians took Berlin . . . they searched every house. Looking for German women.”

  Matthias’s head shot up to look at his mother.

  She stroked his hair. “I was eight months pregnant with you. We were starved during the bombing, and I was very weak. The Russian campaign to . . . that kind of violence . . . would have killed you and me both, before you could even be born. Your grandmother . . . she saved me. She saved you. She—” Cousin Marta choked out the words. “She took their attacks for me.”

  Cousin Marta glanced toward Aunt Hilde, who rocked, gripping her shawl around her frail frame as if it would make her invisible.

  Awash in tears, Cousin Marta lowered her voice to an agonized whisper as she continued, “Once it was over, Mutti became . . . like this. But you—you live. You live because of her courage.” She shook her head, as if to dispel images too horrible to recall. “Mutti stood in front of me and—” Her voice caught in a half sob. “That is how fierce she once was. How precious to her you were—how precious the promise of your life was. How precious it is now.”

  Matthias stared at his mother, paralyzed, as the horror of what she had revealed sank in.

  In the hush, Drew’s dad added carefully, “I don’t know that I could get your mom through with us tonight anyway, Matthias. They’re checking everyone too carefully. The Vopos will definitely be looking to stop any doctors or nurses trying to get over the line. But I promise I’ll work to find a way to bring your mother over—maybe through the State Department. Maybe Mrs. McMahon’s Marienfelde contacts can help. But tonight, you need to come with Drew and me. Now. Right now.”

  “Please listen to Dad, Matthias,” Drew implored. “C’mon.”

  Matthias shook his head hard, covering his ears.

  “Please, mein Schatz.” Cousin Marta gathered Matthias tightly into her arms again, laying her cheek on his hair, closing her eyes and breathing in deeply, clearly memorizing the feel of her child close to her. Then, with a wrenching shudder, she pulled back. “You must go!” she cried. “Get out of the Russian sector. Now. For me.”

  “Für mich auch.”

  Jolted by the subdued, delicate voice, everyone froze.

  Aunt Hilde leaned over, taking Matthias’s hand. She gently kissed it and held it to her heart—just as Drew’s mom had done to help the frail woman recognize that she was her niece. Aunt Hilde fixed her gaze on Matthias and nodded. For me, too, she repeated as she helped Matthias to his feet. Live.

  Drew’s own soul hurt as he watched Matthias throw his arms around his grandmother in a heartbreaking embrace. Then his mother.

  Then and only then did Matthias follow Drew and Sergeant McMahon, grabbing his jacket and shoes at the door—taking nothing else that could identify him—and plummeting down the pitch-black staircase to the seething street below.

  They plunged out into a
darkness roiling with alarm. All the streetlights had been cut, compounding Drew’s sense of disorientation as a storm surge of invisible, angry German voices rolled up the side street:

  “What are you doing?”

  “Stand back!”

  “Please, my family is over there.”

  Drew’s dad put a protective hand on each boy’s shoulder. “Stick close to me,” he said. “I had to hide the car in a plot of rubble close to Potsdamer Platz. We have to go along Zimmerstraße for a block or so. Do not say a word. Understand? You especially, Matthias. Just do as I say, and follow my lead if we get stopped.”

  Sticking close to the wall, dodging the frightened Berliners who were now pouring out of their front doors in their robes and slippers, the trio joined the human flood rushing along the street that just hours before had been a carnival for children.

  A single Volksarmee spotlight illuminated pairs of young East German soldiers moving down the middle of the street. Between them, they held the spokes of massive wheels of barbed wire that, when unfurled, created a thickly coiled, flesh-tearing barrier. As they spread the thorny web, Kampfgruppe factory militiamen were prying up cobblestones with pickaxes to make holes for posts to anchor the wire.

  A truck with loudspeakers cruised the street, blaring its warning:

  The border is now officially closed. Citizens of East Berlin are no longer permitted to enter any part of West Berlin. These measures are for your own good. The American influence on the German people will stop at our gates. Disperse. Return to your homes . . .

  Shielding the workers was an intimidating flank of Grenzpolizisten, tommy guns across their chests, at the ready. But some intrepid Berliners still tried to push their way through them and cross the street to freedom before the barbed wire trap was completely strung. A resolute old woman brought her heavy purse down on the helmet of a soldier so hard that his knees buckled. She started to dart past him, despair making her nimble, but was seized and hauled away to a waiting police van. A boy Drew and Matthias’s age explained that he was expected for the christening of his sister’s baby that day. When the Vopo answered, “Too bad,” the teenager called him a Rindvieh, a dumb ox. The officer slapped the boy’s face and then shoved him with the butt of his rifle toward the same van.

  “Damn it,” Drew’s father cursed. “If only I had my unit with me to help these people.”

  They hurried on until they reached a jumbled hill of broken bricks and glass, a collapsed, once-graceful house, cordoned off from the avenue by its ornate wrought-iron fence. Tucked behind a heap of rubble, cloaked in shadows, was an American Army jeep.

  Thank God. Drew had worried all the way down Zimmerstraße that the jeep wouldn’t be there, hotwired by a desperate Berliner.

  “Get in, boys.”

  Drew vaulted into the trunk, motioning for Matthias to get in the one passenger seat. His dad revved the engine with a backfire and a roar.

  A line of trucks jammed to overflowing with wooden sawhorse barriers rumbled past them.

  “Better not turn on the headlights yet,” muttered Drew’s dad as he blindly steered the jeep, jostling wildly over debris and through the vaulted art deco arch.

  “Stop!” Matthias hissed, hunching down in his seat.

  Coming toward them was a bobbling cloud of lights—a group of people glowing like a bunch of fireflies as they approached, singing:

  The Party, the Party, she is always right!

  “FDJ! Turn off the engine,” Matthias whispered, sliding off the seat into a crouch.

  The fireflies turned out to be a parade of girls in blue blouses and black skirts, carrying flashlights and sprays of summer flowers they planned to give to the GDR “defenders,” the “heroic tank men” now occupying Potsdamer Platz. Following close behind the girls were several men, bright red brassards on their sleeves, carrying billy clubs like malevolent shepherds.

  Drew finally exhaled when they were out of earshot. “Who the hell are those guys?”

  “Proven Party believers,” Matthias answered. “Those armbands mean they’ve been given police powers.” He slowly clambered back into his seat and added grimly, “I knew every one of those faces. If they see me . . .”

  “Yeeaaaaah.” Drew’s father rubbed his face. He looked to the back of the jeep. “Switch places, boys.”

  When Matthias was crouched in the small open-bay trunk, Drew’s dad gave him a comforting smile. “Good thing you’re small, kid,” he told him. “See the part of that bed that tucks up under our seats?”

  Matthias nodded.

  “Can you cram yourself in there?”

  Matthias folded himself up like a praying mantis and disappeared.

  “Put your backpack in front of him, son,” he told Drew. “You can breathe okay, Matthias?”

  “Yes,” his muffled voice answered.

  “Whatever you do, whatever you hear, do not come out until I tell you. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, men. Let’s move out.”

  On Stresemannstraße, heading north, Drew’s dad turned on his low beams. “If we’re stopped, stick to the truth, son. You were visiting your cousin to see the fireworks for the Kinderfest, and I’ve come to bring you home. You’ve got your dog tags on you, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good man. Just remember: the best bluff is an earnest one when you’re dealing with the enemy. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Drew’s dad drove on, keeping to the posted speed limit, exuding battle readiness and a soldier’s calm. “Given how fast they got that wire up near Matthias’s place, we’re going to have to try to get through the Brandenburg Gate. The Allies stand strong just on the other side of it. I think that’s our best chance.”

  Remembering how the young guard at the Brandenburg Gate had shaken down Cousin Marta over a tube of lipstick, Drew didn’t exactly feel confident in his dad’s plan. But with all the barbed wire and troops, what else could they do?

  They reached the edge of the bombed-out Potsdamer Platz that was typically a deserted expanse of broken pavement and weeds. It was studded with tanks. “Damn those Russian bastards,” Drew’s dad grunted. “Those are Soviet T-34s.” He slowed.

  Drew gasped. “What are you doing, Dad?” Didn’t it make sense to get past enemy tanks as quickly as possible?

  “I’m slowing so we can report back numbers. See if you can count those, son.” He kept his pace.

  “. . . Twenty-seven, twenty-eight . . .” Drew corkscrewed in his seat a bit as they drove out of range. “Thirty. I see thirty, Dad.”

  “Hell’s bells.” Sergeant McMahon white-knuckled the steering wheel in response. “Keep your eyes open for any more Russian equipment, okay? I need to report the presence of that many tanks. Our boys are going to be facing a hell of a standoff, if that’s what it comes to.”

  “Yes, sir.” Drew sucked in a breath to steel himself. Then he coughed. “What’s that smell?”

  His dad sniffed. “Tear gas.” He pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to Drew. “Cover your face, son.” Without turning his head he added, “Matthias, cover your nose and eyes.” He stopped the jeep to give the noxious cloud time to dissipate, his hands over his face.

  In front of them, a band of East Berlin youth were throwing paper bags over smoking tear gas canisters and hurling them back at the Vopos who’d shot them into the angry mob. Gagging on their own smoke, a few younger Vopos dropped their guns and staggered, blinded—right into the Western sector. They were suddenly free, if they wanted to be.

  “Look at that,” breathed Drew’s dad as one young Vopo turned and ran into the arms of some West Berlin police. “Score one for liberty.”

  As the vapors dissolved, an older officer who’d been yelling curses at his discombobulated troops spotted their American jeep.

  “Damn.” Drew’s dad
shifted the gears and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. “Hang on, boys!”

  “Halt!” the German shouted. “Sofort!”

  Drew’s dad shifted gears, gunning the jeep to its top speed.

  “Scheiße, Scheiße, Scheiße,” muttered Drew as he grabbed his seat and braced his feet against the open door, almost bouncing out of the jeep as it lurched forward. He could hear Matthias rattling around in his hiding spot, whacking against metal like crackers in a canister.

  KA-PING! Something glanced off the windshield rim.

  “Get down, Drew!”

  KA-PING!

  “They’re shooting at us, Dad!”

  “Hang on, son. If they really wanted to hit us, I’d be shot through by now.”

  KA-PING!

  “Dad!”

  KA-PING!

  “Waffenstillstand! Waffenstillstand!” A voice behind them shouted to cease fire.

  But they only had a few seconds of reprieve. Suddenly, their jeep was surrounded by four GDR motorcycle police.

  “Zur Seite fahren!” The commanding rider shouted for Drew’s dad to pull over—Schnell!

  The Brandenburg Gate—their portal to safety—was in view. But there was no way to reach it through the biker swarm.

  “Son,” Drew’s dad said as he slowed to a stop, waiting for the German officer to approach, “I need your pitcher’s steel nerves now. Bottom of the ninth, tied game. You’re going to strike this guy out. Got it?” He smiled.

  Drew nodded.

  The German kicked down his motorcycle stand and strode toward Drew’s dad, his hobnailed boots click-clicking on the pavement. He pulled off his helmet, revealing gray hair and rays of wrinkles spraying out from his eyes, telltale signs of years spent wearing goggles in sun and wind while riding a military cycle. “Die Grenze ist geschlossen. Was machen Sie auf dieser Seite?”

  “I’m sorry, bud, I don’t speak German.”

  “A pity,” the German answered easily, “since you are in Germany. I said, the border is now closed. What are you doing on this side?”

  “According to the Four Power Agreement, I have every right to be here,” Drew’s dad responded politely enough.