by Richard Wake
That was West Berlin for me. The lure wasn't ideological. It wasn't a life that I desired because I hated my life in the East, or felt particularly repressed, or anything like that. The reason was simple. It was because I didn't feel any of those things, because mine was a privileged life and I knew it. It was a complicated life, yes, but it was privileged. And West Berlin was simply a respite, that and nothing else. I liked being able to go for a night. I liked being able to get in my car without thinking, and pick up Bernie or whoever, and flash my Kripo ID at the border police, and go to the Ku'Damm for the night, and let whatever was going to happen just, well, happen.
I wondered how much I would miss it. I wondered if the wall, or whatever, would become even more of a mental barrier for me than a physical one. Because the truth was, I could get drunk and fool around anywhere. I didn't need the Ku'Damm in any real sense. I didn't crave West Berlin like some people craved the justice they thought they would find there, or their idea of freedom. It wasn't anything like what Elke felt, although I couldn't pretend to understand completely the emotions that poured out of her, the oppression she felt, the rage. Mine was different, and it was all in my head, and I knew it.
But it was still there. That was the fear I felt — not the fear of losing what I had, but losing the abstract possibility of having something different. And if it was as shallow as maybe I was as a person, that's still what it was. And it was real — very real to me. I felt it in my gut as I parked the car along the curb in Pankow, outside of Elke's apartment building. I felt it when I looked in the glove box of the car, just to make sure that the oilcloth bundle holding 212 West German marks was still there. I felt it as I walked up her front steps and tried to calculate how many months' rent the 212 marks might cover in a shithole in Kreuzberg.
48
I didn't even remember thinking about driving straight to Elke's from the meeting with my father-in-law. It was almost as if the car was driving itself when I made the turn into Pankow. Of course, I was going to Elke's. Of course.
I looked at my watch as I climbed the stairs. It was 11:15.
I knocked on the apartment door, and no one answered. I knocked again, and then I banged on it with the flat of my hand, and then I banged a second time, and then the door opened and Elke's brother, Werner, poked his head out. He was both angry and naked. Through the crack in the door, I saw his wife on the couch, scrambling to pull up a sheet and cover her breasts. The two kids, I could see, were sleeping on cushions on the floor.
“You? What?” is all that Werner could manage. I couldn't blame him. It must not have been easy in that apartment, finding anything approaching a comfortable amount of privacy in which to make theirs a true marital bed. Or couch. And here was an interruption from the guy who could choose any of four rooms in his own place for the same purposes — five if you counted the kitchen.
“She's asleep,” Werner said. He began to close the door. I stuck my foot into it.
“Wake her.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“Wake her.”
“No.”
“Elke, it's Peter. I need to see you,” I said. No, I yelled. The children woke up. The younger one said, “Look at Daddy's hiney,” at which point Daddy let go of the door and scampered for a pair of drawers. Elke came out of the bedroom in a robe.
“Peter, what?”
“Just come out here.”
“What time is it?”
“It's later than you think,” I said.
She came out into the hallway, leaned against the wall, and folded her arms. I told her the story as quickly as I could. I don't know if I was talking too fast, or if her just-awake brain was processing my words too slowly, but it took a while for what I was saying to register. And even when it did, she still had to ask, “A wall? Did you say they're going to put up a wall?”
I tried again. I did not dare give up Karl Grimm as the source. I said that it was from people in Keibelstraße who were part of the operation, and that it was going to be barbed wire and soldiers and police blocking the border at the beginning, and that a physical wall of some kind was going to follow soon after.
“So you won't be able to cross anymore?” she said.
“That's my understanding.”
“So I lose my job, all of that? So nobody will literally be able to cross the street anymore between the sectors?”
“Yes. That's it.”
Leaning on the wall, Elke's legs kind of gave way. She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the hallway floor, sitting and sobbing. And then she looked up and said, “But, what—”
“There's no time,” I said. I looked at my watch again — 11:30. I told her the truth, that I didn't know how much time she had, that the whole thing was supposed to happen soon after midnight but that I didn't know exactly how soon.
She started with, “But, what—” I stopped her again.
“You don't have much time to decide,” I said. “Maybe a half hour. Maybe. I'm parked right in front. I'll wait as long as you want me to wait, but I really don't think there's much time. Just come out and tell me, either way.”
I reached down and offered my hands. She took them, and I helped her to her feet.
“You have to talk to a few people, I know,” I said. “But really, I can't emphasize enough, the time.”
She grabbed my wrist, looked at the watch.
“Okay, okay,” Elke said. “If I can convince—”
“You've seen the car,” I said. “I guess we could fit them all, maybe without luggage. Maybe one bag for everyone.”
She nodded, reached for the door, then turned back.
“Thank you,” she said.
49
It was after midnight when Elke finally came out of the apartment building. Actually, it was 12:15. She was carrying a small green suitcase, and she was alone.
“What—”
“I couldn’t convince her,” she said.
“Your mother?”
“Werner wouldn’t even consider it. The two of them, they just tried to shield the kids from the discussion. But my mother… She listened to me, but she just doesn’t get it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But she’s an old woman. She probably wouldn’t know what to do with herself over there.”
“That’s exactly what she said. ‘What life would I have?’ I mean, it’s a goddamned shame. Somehow, she has convinced herself she is happy living in a world where she always thinks there will be bananas tomorrow.”
Finally, we were ready to go. The question was where.
The closest spot I knew was at Bornholmer Straße. There was a pretty big train station there, and a lot of tracks, and the street at the border crossing was actually a bridge over the tracks. I crossed there all the time and never had even the hint of an issue — although, frankly, the Kripo identification pretty much always eliminated even the hint of hint. I could have smuggled a refrigerator over most borders if I had my Kripo ID.
Still, Bornholmer was closest. It was maybe two miles away, probably less. I wound us out of the neighborhood of apartment buildings and made a right onto Berliner Straße. At that time of night, it wouldn’t take five minutes — except when I made the right turn, from Berliner onto Bornholmer, the street was suddenly clogged with a mixture of military vehicles and the kind of trucks you saw delivering building materials to construction sites.
“Oh, shit,” she said.
“Calm down.”
“We’re too late. I shouldn’t have taken so long. Shit, shit, shit.”
“Really, really,” I said. “It’s a big city. Just calm down.”
I wanted to tell her that, yes, you’re right, you shouldn’t have taken more than 45 minutes trying to convince your mother to uproot a life she never had any intention of uprooting. But I didn’t. Instead, I just slalomed my way through the trucks and managed to get a few blocks farther down. We were in sight of the bridge. But then a uniform — Vopo — stopped me.
“Yo
u have to turn around, comrade,” he said. “Security operation in progress.”
He leaned out of my window and turned his attention back to the street, holding up an advancing vehicle, giving me a space to turn around. He pointed. “Just head back where you came from.”
I pulled out my identification. He looked at it.
“It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, Kripo Under Lieutenant Peter Ritter,” he said, handing it back. “Now please turn around.”
Which I did.
“Big city, big city,” I said, but Elke was weeping.
Big city, big city. That became my mantra as we drove. We went farther south, down Schonhauser Allee. I knew another spot — I used to call it the Dead Crossing because it was always so quiet.
I told Elke, “Bernie and I once — okay, we were pretty drunk — but we concluded with absolute certainty that, even without my ID, we could have sneaked the entire Bolshoi Ballet back and forth over the line a half dozen times at Chausseestraße without anybody noticing.”
“I’ll settle for a bit less than that,” she said. Her smile was just south of weak, which meant it was much closer to a frown than anything.
It was another five minutes or so to Chausseestraße. The military vehicles and the construction trucks were multiplying as we drove. We got to within a half-block of the Chausseestraße crossing when we were stopped again, not by a cop this time but by a line of soldiers with rifles. I could see what was happening over their shoulders. Wooden sawhorses were being placed at intervals in the middle of the street, and rolls of barbed wire were being strung across and attached to the sawhorses.
We had no choice but to turn back. Elke began to hyperventilate.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
“What?”
“We’re pretty close to Bernie’s. Maybe…”
He lived on Bernauer Straße, which was a border street between the East and, I thought, the French sector. We got within about a block and a half, but I could see the now-familiar clog of trucks carrying barbed wire and sawhorses ahead of us. So I made a quick left turn and parked.
“Take your bag,” I said. “We’re walking. We can get there this way, I think — up there and through the alley. It’s just the next block.” I pointed straight and then indicated a right turn.
She opened the door on her side. I leaned over and took the oilcloth package from the glove box.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just, um, just something for Bernie.”
50
The apartment was on the first floor. We went in the back door of the building, turned right, and then I banged on the first door. Bernie answered in his underwear.
“Can't you hear what's going on?” I said.
“When I'm out, I'm out. What are you talking about?”
Bernie was too sleepy, it seemed, to worry about modesty. His drawers had a big hole in the right ass cheek, but he did nothing to cover up. I made quick introductions, and then I explained what was happening, and then we all rushed to the window in his living room. Looking to the right, we could see the barbed wire and the sawhorses and the uniforms milling around, rifles ready.
“It all makes sense now,” Bernie said. “You should have seen my boss this morning. I had Saturday duty, and he was in the office — which never happens on a Saturday. And I've never seen him more nervous. I left at about two in the afternoon, and Krug was coming in, Harry Krug. He's the big gun. He gets the important interviews. He's been working at the paper since, hell, since '45, and he never has to work Saturdays. I wondered if he was being punished or something.”
We leaned out again. The positioning of the barricades seemed odd to me, and I pointed it out to Bernie and Elke. They seemed to be attaching it to the side of Bernie's apartment building.
“Isn't the border the middle of the street?” I said. “Like, the normal checkpoints. The French guy is on one side of Bernauer — you see, he's still over there, with a couple of others — and the GDR checkpoint is on the other side. So the border is in the middle, right?”
We looked again. They definitely weren't stringing the wire across the middle of the street.
“I don't get it,” Elke said. “Where's the damn border? It has to be in the middle of the street, right?”
“Oh, shit, I know this,” Bernie said. We ducked our head back inside. “It had to do with the street sweepers, believe it or not — an old guy on the third floor once told me the story. The border between Wedding and Mitte was in the middle of Bernauer Straße, but the street sweepers from both districts bitched years ago, like in the '30s, that they both had to clean the street. So they changed the boundary. The whole street and the sidewalk were designated to be in Wedding, but the buildings themselves were in Mitte. They used the same lines after the war when they divided the city. So the street and the sidewalk are in the French sector, but our building is in the Russian sector.”
“So the building is in the East but the sidewalk out front is in the West?” I said.
“Yes. The back door is in the East but the first step out the front door is in the West.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Bernie said. Then he leaned out the window again, and I did, too. We looked to the right, to the sawhorses and the wire being hooked to the edge of the building. There also was a guard stationed at the point where the wire and the building were being attached.
“Yeah, I'm pretty sure,” Bernie said. “And what they're doing over there kind of proves it, doesn't it?”
I couldn't help but laugh. For all of these years, people had been going to elaborate lengths to get on the train with at least some of their possessions, just a few, and not attract any attention as they crossed to the west. All along, though, if they had known about Bernauer Straße, they could have backed a truckload of their furniture up behind Bernie's building and carried it, piece by piece, through the back door and out the front door into West Berlin.
Bernie caught my laugh and said, “Yeah, the old man told me that if he was right -- he was never 1,000 percent sure -- we could have made a fortune if we could tell people. He said, 'We could call it Bernie's Bernauer Toll Plaza,' and we could split the fees.”
“So…” Elke said.
“Yeah, I think so,” I said.
“How long do you think before the fucking Vopo comes into the building to secure it?” Bernie said.
Then he looked at me.
“No offense intended.”
“None taken, asshole.” I said. Then I leaned out the window again. There were more uniforms assembling around someone who was likely a superior officer. He was pointing in my direction. I didn't think it was directly at me, but at the building as a whole. I looked to my left, and there were two other heads poking out of different apartment windows.
“Look,” I said, and Bernie and Elke stuck their heads out for a second before turning back.
“I think they're starting to move,” he said.
“I think it's now or never,” I said.
51
They both looked at me.
“Lock the door,” I said, and Bernie ran over.
“And hit the lights, too.”
“All right, miss,” I said, pointing her to the window. But Bernie stopped me.
“Give me a minute,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m going.”
“You’re—”
“I’m going,” he said.
With no time for niceties, he was out of the drawers he slept in, naked within about two feet of Elke, and then into a clean pair in seconds, followed immediately by a shirt and pants and socks and shoes. He stuffed a small suitcase with whatever clothing would fit and was done about a minute later. Then there was a loose floorboard he removed, and a wad of West German marks that he pulled out of the hole and stuffed into his pocket. Did everybody hide their illegal foreign currency under the floorboards?
“But what are you going
to do — you know, for a living?” I said.
“Hand me that bag,” he said. There was a small canvas satchel on the table next to me. Bernie unzipped it and showed me, very quickly, a camera and what appeared to be an expensive portable radio of some sort.
“Not from the Konsum, I presume,” I said.
“You presume correctly. It’s a police scanner. Top of the line. I had to save for a year.”
“A quite illegal police scanner.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. I can make a living over there with that and the camera — rushing to fires, to police calls, and selling the pictures to whatever paper will buy them. Work my way onto a paper that way. I’ll just need to get a bicycle to start.”
“So, you’ve thought about this.”
“Only every day,” he said. “I lived like shit, and I dressed like shit — as you well know — but I saved.”
“For this day?”
“I didn’t know it would be this day. But I was sure I wasn’t going to die in this country.”
“But—”
“You know, you’re almost as cynical as I am, if you would just admit it to yourself, be honest with yourself,” Bernie said. “You have eyes. You can see the truth. You know that things can be better.”
My mind was spinning. I literally couldn’t focus. I thought about the life I had, and the career I was building, but also the crap I had to do for my father-in-law in order to preserve that life. I thought about how I was getting better at what I did, however slowly, and how I had just solved two murders, however luckily. And then I also thought about Hohenschonhausen, where Kurt Braun was sitting in a cell if he wasn’t dead.