Life Behind the Wall

by Robert Elmer

  “Sorry, kid. Just trying to make a joke.”

  Erich didn’t answer as he stared up at the dark ceiling. And it sounded like Fred DeWitt wasn’t done asking questions yet.

  “I know there haven’t been a lot of things to joke about in Berlin lately. Did you have to leave the city during the war?”

  Erich thought about not answering, about pretending he’d gone back to sleep. But he had to tell the American something.

  “Thanks to you, we did. We were almost killed too.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What about your father? Was he — ”

  Erich spit out his answer to the dark, which was somehow easier than face-to-face.

  “My father was drafted into the army when I was seven. My older sister was nine.”

  “He was in the Wehrmacht, the army?”

  Erich paused before deciding to answer.

  “A chaplain. He never shot a gun in his life. But just before he had to leave, he went back to the church where he was a pastor, I think to bring home a few things. Then your bombs started dropping. He never made it back.” No one said anything for another long minute. DeWitt finally cleared his throat, though, and his voice sounded far away.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  That’s what they all said. But Erich wasn’t through yet.

  “They told us we had to leave, my mother and sister and I. The bombs were coming day and night, all the time. The city wasn’t safe. But you know that part of the story.”

  Fred DeWitt didn’t answer.

  “My oma was supposed to leave too, but she was too stubborn. Always stubborn. My mom nearly went crazy about it. We have no idea how Oma survived all the bombs, except that none fell on her building. She always talks about angels.”

  Still no answer from DeWitt.

  “But they took us to a little village a hundred miles north, to get away from American bombs.”

  Erich made sure he reminded DeWitt the bombs were American.

  “Is that where you stayed the rest of the war?”

  “Nein. A few months before it all ended, the government took us away once more, except this time we had to travel in cattle cars, which was horrible because we all got lice from the old straw we had to sleep in.”

  “I’ve never had lice.”

  “It’s like torture; they bite you all over. And you get these big welts. But that wasn’t all. We stayed in a farmer’s barn for a couple of months, and then we nearly froze to death, until my mother decided we should go back to Berlin.”

  Erich took a deep breath, and it truly seemed like someone else was telling the story, not him. He only felt numb now, nothing else, and he didn’t care who was listening. The tears had all been cried, the feelings all felt, and the only thing left was the dull anger. But still he went on.

  “So we walked all night and all day, and the roads were full of people who had the same idea we did. Everybody just wanted to get home, no matter what. We could die out there, or we could die back home. Except we didn’t know we were walking straight into the Russian battle zone. During the day the Russian planes came flying over, shooting their machine guns at us. We had to dive into the ditches, only some of us didn’t — ” His words caught, and he took a deep breath. His voice fell to a whisper, even softer than before.

  “— some of us didn’t make it. A man that we knew, a milkman from back home in Berlin, he helped my mother and me bury my sister.”

  There. Was that the kind of story the American had expected? But now Erich had to keep going.

  “So we stayed in an abandoned castle for a couple of days, stayed there with only the servants. But there was nothing to eat so we had to keep walking, ten or fifteen miles a day. I had to carry our suitcase, until we found a baby carriage we could use. The baby had died. Don’t know why we didn’t too.”

  “And the Russians?” DeWitt found his voice again.

  “The Russians came almost every day, just stopped us and pointed their guns at us, took whatever they wanted. What did we have left? Some of those guys had watches all the way up their arms.”

  “Pirates. But you finally made it home.”

  “What was left of it, after the Russians — well, we had to hide for a month until the Americans and the British and the French came. But my mom says we were lucky to find another place to stay in. Our old house was a pile of bricks.”

  “Look, I know I keep saying this, but I’m really sorry.”

  But Erich didn’t say anything else. Couldn’t. He just lay with his eyes open in the dark, listening to the planes taking off and landing, fighting back the sleep and the dreams of the men and the parachutes, chasing him, chasing him —

  8

  KAPITEL ACHT

  JUST AN ACCIDENT

  “Would you look at that shiner!” Fred DeWitt bent in front of his shaving mirror, squinting at himself.

  Erich stretched and pulled the covers back over his head, wondering if he’d really told all his stories in the dark, or if it had been a dream.

  Probably a dream. And what was a “shiner,” anyway? He peeked out between his hands.

  Oh. Now he remembered, and the knuckles on his right hand seemed a bit sore to match.

  “You see that?” DeWitt turned toward him and pointed to the dark purple halo of a bruise around his eye. “I haven’t had a black eye like that since I was a kid. Good thing it’s not going to be me in those pictures.”

  Erich kept an eye on the man shaving as he slipped on his clothes.

  “You’re not mad?”

  “Who, me?” DeWitt chuckled. “Nah. You didn’t know what you were doing. Did you?”

  “Coming out!” Katarina knocked from inside DeWitt’s bedroom before she came out, but she stopped for a moment in the doorway, staring.

  “See what your cousin did to me last night?” DeWitt balanced his army cap on his head and slicked down his hair. “I should have put him to bed with boxing gloves.”

  “It was an accident,” Erich mumbled as he followed DeWitt out the door. Katarina still gave him a funny look, as if she weren’t sure she should believe him. But they hardly had time to talk about anything as they followed the sergeant to breakfast.

  Erich wasn’t sure why DeWitt called it a “mess” hall, since the floors looked clean enough to eat from, and he might have called it a dining hall. But the noise, and the men, and the food!

  “Extra big helping of scrambled eggs for my friends here, Sam.” DeWitt pointed them out to a large black man standing behind a long counter crammed end-to-end with steaming stainless-steel platters of scrambled eggs, sausages, toast, and a kind of porridge. Erich wasn’t quite sure what to do when DeWitt pulled his plate and tray in closer and the cook dished up a huge helping of everything.

  “You sure you can handle all that, kid?” asked the cook.

  Erich checked his plate, now piled high with breakfast, and he almost grinned. Almost.

  “I can handle it.”

  So could Katarina, for that matter, who put away nearly as much as her cousin, thank you, dankeshön. And they were almost through their fourth piece of toast with butter and orange marmalade when DeWitt looked at his watch and scooted back his chair.

  “Sorry to cut things short, kids.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “But we have some snapshots to take and a plane to catch.”

  Well, that was fine, but Erich still had eggs on his plate. He shoveled as much as he could into the next few bites. If only he could take home even a piece of toast —

  “Jussaminute.” He held up his hand for them to wait, gasped for air, and felt some of the eggs go down the wrong pipe.

  Nicht so gut.

  “Ahh-HAACK!” As Katarina pounded him on the back, he couldn’t help turning his head to the side and spraying out the half-chewed eggs —

  — right on top of a pair of shiny black military shoes.

  And no, he really did not want to look up and see whose uniform he had just decorated. Better to slide under th
e table now. But as he caught his breath he had no choice.

  “Er . . . Captain Matthews.” DeWitt sounded a little edgy. “These are the German kids I told you about. The ones we’re doing a story on.”

  Erich finally gathered the courage to look up at a frowning man in uniform, who looked down at his egg-speckled shoes.

  “And we’re terribly sorry about that, sir.” DeWitt held out a napkin. “But actually, we’re a little late, and we’d probably better get going.”

  DeWitt grabbed Erich’s arm as he apologized once more, and they scooted out of the mess hall.

  “Don’t we have to take our trays back to the kitchen,” wondered Katarina, “like everybody else?”

  “Not now,” mumbled DeWitt. “Just follow me.”

  They walked over to the airfield, where they spent the next half hour standing beside air crews, saying “Cheese.”

  “He’s just making me more hungry,” whispered Erich, “talking about cheese all the time.” And Katarina scolded him when he pulled three big packages of Juicy Fruit chewing gum from his pocket.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked as they waited for DeWitt to talk to a pilot about their ride back to Berlin.

  “Those guys over there gave it to me when we were taking all those pictures. Said I looked as if I could use it. Do I look that desperate to you?”

  “Not so much today. Today you just look full. Did you get enough eggs back there? Enough to eat?”

  Actually, yes, today he felt full, for the first time in . . . well, a long time. He looked down at the candy in his hands but stuffed it back into his pocket again when he noticed someone watching them from outside the airfield’s chain-link fence.

  “What are they looking at?” he wondered aloud. But he knew without asking. And it wasn’t just one or two kids now, but three, five, ten of them.

  All staring. He tried not to return the stare, tried to ignore the little question that chewed at the back of his mind, the question that swirled in the pit of his stomach and made him want to shrink.

  “Almost makes me feel guilty.”

  Katarina looked at him with a crinkled nose, as if she didn’t understand.

  “Do you have a fever, Erich Becker?” She reached over and felt his forehead with the palm of her hand, the way a mother would do. “You’ve never talked about feeling guilty before.”

  He felt his pockets to make sure the gum was still there. Oh, and the Hershey wrapper from the candy bar he’d eaten himself. At least he had another one to bring home with him, for Oma, the way he had promised. But —

  “But I ate all that breakfast,” he answered. “That was more than we have in a whole week back home. For sure a whole lot more than what Oma gets. Didn’t that cross your mind?”

  “Of course it did.”

  Still, he couldn’t keep from staring back at the crowd of kids on the other side of the fence. Meanwhile, DeWitt motioned them over to a plane near the middle of the lineup.

  “Here’s our ride,” he told them as the last coal-smudged worker came out of the hold, slapping the dust off his hands. “All loaded and ready to fly.”

  As they stepped closer, a little door in the belly of the plane opened, then shut again with a snap. Not a door, exactly; more like a mail slot.

  “What’s that?” Katarina wondered aloud.

  “Pre-flight,” answered DeWitt. “They’re just checking everything to make sure it works. That’s the flare chute, for dropping out emergency flares.”

  Erich wasn’t sure he liked that word, emergency. Hopefully they wouldn’t need anything like that. But as he climbed inside the plane, he looked back toward the fence one more time, and he felt the gum in his pocket.

  And he started to get an idea.

  “Well, if it isn’t our friendly local stowaways!” Sergeant Fletcher came out to greet them in the crowded cargo hold. It was stuffed to the gills with bulging burlap sacks. He grinned and slapped Erich on the back. “Ready to head back home?”

  “Just a few more photos.” DeWitt explained what they’d been doing as they took their places behind Lieutenant Anderson, who grunted and nodded at them as he went through his pre-flight check. Fletcher didn’t seem to notice his grumpy pilot.

  “Did you see that horrible mess?” He pointed with his thumb at the back of the plane. “I thought we were doing just fine carrying flour and powdered milk. But somebody got the bright idea to fill us up with sacks of coal. My clean airplane!”

  The lieutenant kept flipping switches but paused a moment to catch his co-pilot’s attention.

  “Pre-flight checklist, Fletcher.”

  “Right, sir!” Fletcher grabbed his trusty checklist as they worked, flipping switches and pulling knobs, adjusting levers, checking and rechecking each step. The pilot would bark things like “Bypass valve down!” (whatever that meant), and the copilot would echo every word. Erich watched, though he did take a moment to poke at the flare chute just behind the pilot’s seat. His idea could work.

  Ten minutes later the four engines finally roared to life, each one in turn, sending storms of smoke swirling behind them. Throttle up. All four engines spun up to full power as the plane lurched and bumped through puddles on its way to the head of the takeoff line, then forward faster faster faster, until they nosed up and left the muddy airfield below.

  “Think you’d ever like to fly a plane like this someday?” DeWitt asked Erich above the roar of the engines a few minutes later. Erich nodded before he could catch himself. Well, what did it matter? He looked over at the bundles of parachutes tucked under a seat. He couldn’t do this by himself.

  “Do you have any handkerchiefs, DeWitt?” Erich pulled the gum from his pocket, and the American gave him a puzzled look. “All we need are a few handkerchiefs and some string.”

  By the time they approached Tempelhof Airport, Erich and Katarina held three handkerchief parachutes ready, each one tied with string at its four corners and each one carrying a pack of Juicy Fruit.

  “Hold one of the chutes up for me.” DeWitt aimed his camera at Katarina, and the flash went off. “Perfect. In fact, this whole idea is perfect. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. This is going to be front-page.”

  “I didn’t mean for it to be on your front page,” mumbled Erich. Maybe he’d made a mistake.

  “Just don’t get in my way,” growled their pilot as they once again neared the city.

  “You’re sure the chutes won’t just land on the roofs of one of those ruined apartment buildings?” Fletcher wanted to know.

  “Kids will find them,” Katarina told him. “Especially over the Russian sector. They watch the planes.”

  “The Russian sector?” Lieutenant Anderson frowned. “Nobody said anything about the Russian sector. We drop stuff over there, and we’re going to stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble.”

  “Oh, come on, Lieutenant.” DeWitt folded the parachute back up and carefully wound the string around it before handing it back to Katarina. “It’s just candy. What can it hurt?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s a bad idea.”

  Erich bit his lip, wondering if the lieutenant might be right. What would the Russians do if they saw little parachutes coming down on their territory? But by that time DeWitt was grinning and snapping photos nonstop as Anderson and Fletcher worked to bring the plane in low and slow over the city. The lieutenant called for their before-landing checklist, and Fletcher knew the drill.

  “Heater switches off,” barked the pilot.

  “Off.”

  “Main tanks on.”

  “On.”

  And so a little lower, even lower than the tops of some of the crumbled apartment buildings. Katarina, who knew the Russian sector as well as anyone, served as spotter. She chose Fletcher’s window and gave them a running review of the city below.

  “Wait a minute, Katarina.” Erich watched the roofs below and felt his stomach turn flip-flops. “We’d better not do this.”

  “Too late,”
she told him. “We’re coming up on the Tiergarten! And oh, there’s the Brandenburg Gate! We’re going so fast. The Versöhnungskirche is coming up. I see the steeple, near Oma’s apartment. That would be a good place. Is the little door open?”

  DeWitt pried open the little door and whoosh! Even at landing speeds, the wind rushed by the plane outside. And for a moment Erich panicked as he thought of what it must have been like for the men who dropped bombs over this same city, not so long ago.

  “It’s fine.” DeWitt didn’t look worried. He just held one of the gum parachutes ready and looked up. Katarina held up her hand and counted down from three.

  “Drei, zwei, eins . . . now!”

  “Chutes away!” Erich and the American stuffed the three bundles out, one after the other, and Erich wondered how much trouble they would be getting into because of this silly idea, or who would find the treats. One of the hungry kids on Rheinsbergerstrasse, probably. DeWitt whooped, then straightened up when Lieutenant Anderson shot a glance over his shoulder.

  “Done yet?” asked the pilot. “I don’t want those things snagging my landing gear or nothing.”

  “No snags,” answered DeWitt. “But that won’t be the last time we do this.”

  “No kidding?” Fletcher glanced out the window, and DeWitt pointed at him.

  “Absolutely positively. You, my friend, are going to help us with the biggest gum drop in history.”

  9

  KAPITEL NEUN

  FIRST MEETING

  “You’ve never been in a taxi before, have you?” DeWitt grinned at them in the back of the car.

  Was it that obvious? Erich tried not to look so stiff as he watched Urbanstrasse go by. Imagine! Riding in a taxi for a walk home that would take only twenty minutes, at the most! He wondered what the kids in the neighborhood would think when they saw him and Katarina with the American soldier.

  “My father took a taxi, before — ” Katarina’s voice faded, and it reminded Erich he wasn’t the only one who had lost family during the war. Outside their window, though, it looked as if the war had never ended. On the corner a half dozen street people nearly mobbed a man as he set out a garbage can with restaurant food scraps. The grin left DeWitt’s face.