Life Behind the Wall

by Robert Elmer

  “You don’t understand anything.” No, no, no. He bit his tongue. He’d only meant to think it, not say the words out loud. But his tongue seemed to have its own mind.

  “Wait a minute, Erich. We’re not done here.”

  “Fred, no.” This time Erich’s mother took DeWitt’s arm, but the military man wasn’t through.

  “I don’t know about you,” Erich snapped, and wished it hadn’t come out sharp enough to cut, “but I’m done.”

  Erich pulled at the door. Out, out. Anywhere but here. Before his mother started crying. Didn’t DeWitt see? But DeWitt didn’t see; he just parked his toe to stop the door.

  “Why do you always think I’m stupid, Erich? You really think I haven’t lived at all? That I don’t know what you’re thinking?”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid.” Erich tugged at the doorknob. “I just don’t think you understand me. You speak German, but — ”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not the only guy on the planet who ever lost his dad. Did you know mine left when I was twelve? So I think I know just a little bit of what you’ve been going through. If you’d just stop running away — ”

  Erich stared at the door as DeWitt’s words echoed through the room.

  “I didn’t know that,” he finally breathed and let the doorknob go. He felt low enough to crawl under the closed door. Instead, he wandered over to the window.

  “You weren’t supposed to. But I’ll tell you, kid . . . maybe we have more in common than you think.”

  “Maybe.” And this time he didn’t tense up just because DeWitt rested a hand on his shoulder. He tensed because of what he saw on the street below, through the window.

  “Erich,” his mother told him, “I know it’s a big adjustment. We can talk about it some more later.”

  But Erich hardly heard her as he backed away from the window. After all these months, why now?

  “The Russians,” he whispered. “They’re back.”

  “Are you sure?” DeWitt moved to the side of the window and peered out from behind the curtain. “I don’t see anything now.”

  Erich peeked again, and the car had disappeared. Was he seeing things?

  16

  KAPITEL SECHZEHN

  LAST GOOD-BYE

  This time Erich didn’t care if the Russians followed him or not, or whether he had really seen them or not. What did he have to tell them, anyway? They were wasting their time, following the wrong person. He ran with his head down, faster and faster until his lungs could not keep up with his legs, and he finally had to stop and breathe. By that time a drizzle had soaked through his shirt, but he didn’t care about that, either. Didn’t care about the tears that ran down his cheeks and mixed with the rain.

  He had been right about one thing.

  He did still have a lot of things to figure out, a lot of things to think through. Would going with his mother and DeWitt to Clevelandohio really be so bad? He sighed. Maybe not. DeWitt said that in Clevelandohio people didn’t go to bed hungry. In Clevelandohio, the buildings weren’t all bombed out and empty. In Clevelandohio, everyone drove their own automobiles, and there were no Russian soldiers in Clevelandohio.

  So maybe Clevelandohio would not be that terrible, after all. He wiped away another stupid tear, hoping no one saw him on Ackerstrasse, near the Versöhnungskirche.

  His church. But movement on a pile of rubble next to the church caught his eye as the sun peeked out once more. An alley cat, probably. Or not. A second later he saw Wolfgang tumble down the pile without a word and run in the opposite direction, down the strasse, and around the corner.

  Well. Not that he’d wanted to chat with Wolfgang anyway. But what had sent him running? He looked up and down the strasse once more before he slipped through the gap in the fence and found his way back into the kirche.

  For the last time?

  Quietly he picked his way down the hall, wondering what it took to get Weiss the Church-mouse’s attention. If he tiptoed, surely the man would not hear him.

  But what was he doing here? Hoping for wisdom from his father? Saying good-bye? He stood in the entry to his father’s study, and once more he could not help feeling very small and young and stupid. The key in his pocket didn’t fit some special treasure. What was he thinking? It just reminded him of what he could not have. He pulled out the key, squeezed it in his fist. And without thinking about it, he flung it across the room.

  Good-bye. And I’m sorry for the way it turned out. Sorry I didn’t keep my promise to take care of Mom as well as I should have. Sorry I failed. He couldn’t say the words out loud, but he meant them all the same, and he turned to go. Even though —

  No. Even if it didn’t fit anything, the key had belonged to his father, had been held by his father. He would keep it. He’d take it to America and keep it with him always. Erich turned back and stepped over the rubble to the wall where the key had landed with a plink. Had it bounced under the collapsed desk? He got down on his knees to look for it. A little bit of gray light filtered in through the hole in the ceiling here, just enough to let him see —

  — a small keyhole on the underside of the desk! It was where his father would have once parked his knees. How had he not seen it before? Only now that he had found the keyhole, what about the key?

  “Oh, brother.” He searched a few more minutes with no luck. Maybe the key didn’t land near the desk, he thought. Maybe it went down inside the hollow plaster wall and dropped down to who-knows-where. He backed out from under the desk, bumping his head with a crack as he did.

  “Owww!” He squinted in pain, but the hollow cracking sound wasn’t so much his head as the desk itself. Maybe —

  He lay down under the desk again. Using the heel of his hand, he slammed as hard as he could into the wood panel with the little keyhole, his father’s hiding place. Let the Churchmouse hear him; he didn’t care.

  Crack! He tried again and again, and each time the wood gave way just a little more. Two more times, three, and the seam began to open. Four times, five, and his hand ached from the hammering, until the small door finally gave way. A little cloth bag fell onto his chest.

  He could not move, his heart hammered so. But after checking to make sure the rest of the little compartment was empty, he finally crawled out from beneath the desk and emptied the little bag onto the floor. He felt like a pirate there in the ruined building, pouring out a small river of silver reichsmark coins in the last light of the day.

  Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . . He counted again, just to be sure he wasn’t imagining it. Katarina would surely tell him she had read a story like this once, and it seemed far too unreal. Real people didn’t find thirty-five reichsmarks in a compartment of a splintered desk, did they? He wasn’t sure what such a treasure was worth today, but it didn’t matter. Surely his father had meant for it to help him and his mother in an emergency, even in a small way.

  Now it all made sense! Look in Luther for the key, and the key opened the little coin stash under the desk. Except his father didn’t have a chance to tell them the whole story before he’d been killed by the Nazis. Not the Americans. Not the air raid. Not the bombs.

  Well, no matter how much it was worth, his mother could use the money. Maybe it would buy them a new suit of clothes when they made it to Clevelandohio. Or a new car? He focused on scooping the coins back into the little bag, until he noticed that a cloud had slipped in front of the sun, darkening the room.

  Actually, not a cloud. Erich looked up to see the Russian officer with the shark black eyes, hands on his hips, bigger than life. There would be no slipping by this man.

  Captain Viktor Yevchenko, at your service.

  “Erich Becker.” The man dusted off his hands as if he had been infected by stepping inside the ruined house of worship. “I’m very pleased to have finally caught up with you . . . after all these months.”

  Pleased was not a word Erich would have used within spitting distance. He palmed the coin bag and slipped it in
to his pocket as he stood. In time?

  “Why have you been following me?” asked Erich.

  Captain Yevchenko sighed and rolled his eyes.

  “Perhaps you’ve already forgotten our meeting on the street a few months back? Though I regret the negative impression I must have made on you and your family.”

  “You hurt my mother.”

  “An unfortunate misunderstanding.” Captain Yevchenko held up a hand. “Pasternov was reprimanded for being so rough with you, and I apologize. I hope it will not be necessary again.”

  “Right.” Erich squeezed his lips together in a silent prayer and wondered what he was supposed to say to that. How about “I need to go.”

  But Captain Yevchenko didn’t move out of the way, only pretended they were having a pleasant conversation. What did he want?

  “Now you’re wondering why I’m here, perhaps.” From this angle he looked almost sorry to be there. “I think you will understand very soon. Now turn around.”

  Erich blinked. What?

  “I said turn around! Please. I don’t want you to be hurt.”

  Erich had no idea what would happen next. He only knew that he couldn’t just stand there and let it happen. Why couldn’t Katarina have been here this time? He lunged for the door, but the Russian must have been expecting it. As Erich hollered and kicked, Captain Yevchenko spun him around, pinned his arms against his back, and forced him to his knees, leaving Erich gasping for breath.

  “I am so sorry,” the man apologized once more as he taped Erich’s wrists together with electrical tape. Then he wound the tape around Erich’s head and over his mouth. “This will only be for a short while. Is that too tight?”

  Erich leaned up against the wall, still stunned by the ferocious wrestling moves that left him helpless and silent on the floor. And why? He glanced up at the man for a clue.

  “Please let me assure you one more time.” Captain Yevchenko lowered himself to Erich’s level. “I regret having to put you through this. It’s just that we need your help right now.”

  Erich didn’t bother trying to argue the point, not with his mouth taped shut. He was still trying to breathe.

  “In fact, I have two girls, not much younger than you, back home in Moscow. Two lovely girls with no mother; now they stay with my sister.”

  For a moment he sounded like a real person, and for a moment his black eyes softened as he spoke of people he cared about. So the Shark had a soul, though he hid it behind the anger of his next question. “And do you know who killed their mother?”

  Erich could guess. This had something to do with what the German army did. Captain Yevchenko took a deep breath and sighed.

  “But I leave the past behind. Now we build for the future, and we have much to look forward to. It is now only the Americans who stand in our way.” He raised his voice, as if giving a speech. “They stand in the way of a unified Germany. And they stand in the way of a unified Socialist world.”

  So now it was the Americans against the Communists. This Cold War that DeWitt always talked about. But Captain Yevchenko still had his point to make, and he lowered his face to look straight at Erich. Erich could close his eyes, but it would do no good.

  “Your only mistake, Erich Becker, is making friends with the wrong man, with the wrong side. The side that can never win. Your American spy friend, Sergeant DeWitt? You might know who he really is, or you might not. That is not the point, because now we are left with only one way to deal with him. I have been waiting for this chance for many weeks.”

  He straightened up once more, washing his hands in the air.

  “And I give you my word, you will be free to go after we deal with him.”

  What did this mean, this dealing with DeWitt? Erich shivered at the thought and wondered what he had to do with it, tied up like this. He tried to wiggle his wrists, now tingly and numb, when a pair of feet appeared at the door.

  “Comrade Wolfgang.” Captain Yevchenko turned to meet the boy, and Erich could only gasp when he remembered how Wolfgang had seen him coming down the street.

  Comrade?

  Wolfgang the Lookout stood at the door with no expression on his face, as if he saw people tied up like this every day. Meanwhile, Captain Yevchenko pulled a small pad and pencil from his uniform pocket and wrote something, thinking for a moment, then looking to Erich.

  “Allein is the right word in German, is it not? By himself with no others? Yes, of course. Allein, alone. The sergeant will come alone, immediately, to guarantee the safety of the boy.” He looked up from his note. “This is something he will understand, will he not? Let us hope so.”

  Erich could hear no more of this, but when he tried to get to his feet, Captain Yevchenko pushed him back to the floor. And so Erich could do nothing but lie with his face in the shreds of his father’s library. He looked up in time to see Captain Yevchenko tear off his note and hand it to Wolfgang the Robot, Wolfgang the Zombie, who said not a word.

  “Hurry, now.” Captain Yevchenko patted his comrade on the shoulder. “We don’t want Erich to be uncomfortable on the floor.”

  Erich would have screamed if he thought it would do any good. Instead, he worked his wrists, trying to loosen the tape. And just an inch from his face, behind a pile of shredded books, he spotted the little key.

  17

  KAPITEL SIEBZEHN

  COME ALONE

  At least Captain Yevchenko hadn’t noticed his father’s collection of coins. That should make Erich feel a lot better, lying facedown in the ruins of the Versöhnungskirche.

  Oh, and knowing where the key was made Erich feel better too.

  Right?

  He grunted as he wriggled his wrists, trying to keep the blood flowing to his hands. Maybe in the process he could loosen his wrists a little too. But Yevchenko had strapped the tape on too tightly for that. Still, he almost had to smile, imagining what Katarina would have said if she’d been here.

  I read a book like this once. And she would probably tell him the story of a man who undid his wrists, pretended to be asleep, and then thunked the prison guard on the head when he came in the cell to give the man a bowl of thin soup. That’s how it happened in the adventure novels.

  Only not this time. Erich’s hands went from tingling to pins-and-needles numb. After a few minutes he started sneezing from the moldy dust. And though he worked at it for more than a half hour, it was no good trying to chew through the layers of tape strapped across his mouth.

  Captain Yevchenko paced the hallway. How long will they keep me here? Erich wondered. What if DeWitt isn’t around? And even if he is, will he really come to the Soviet sector, alone . . . just to save me?

  He heard a faint scurrying sound, a scratching in the corner, which could mean only one thing.

  In a moment he’d be nose-to-nose with a rat.

  Lord, how did I get into such a mess? Erich closed his eyes and prayed, not knowing how God would answer, or whether God would think this mess he’d gotten himself into in a ruined church was a horribly sick joke. And the worst part was, it looked like it was going to get a lot worse before it got better.

  If it got better. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, waiting for a nibble at his nose or the tickle of a rat whisker. Without opening his eyes he blew through his nose, over and over.

  Shoo, rat! Get away!

  He shivered at the thought, blew a little faster, as if burning coals had brushed his lips: foo-foo-foo.

  Where was it? He heard the scratching sound once more and opened one eye halfway, just to check.

  What? The rat had turned into a very human face belonging to the churchmouse janitor, Helmut Weiss. He peered straight at Erich through a gaping hole in the back wall and gave him a strange look. Well, anyone would have to wonder, after all that foo-ing. But where had the man come from?

  Never mind that. Captain Yevchenko had returned to the study, washing his hands in the air once more. Weiss shook his head and melted back into the shadows.

  “W
hat are you doing in here on your face?” asked the captain, pulling Erich up by the shirt collar. “That can’t be very comfortable.”

  He propped Erich up against the wall like a rag doll and grinned. So much for chewing through the tape on his mouth. So much for wiggling his hands free and overpowering his captor. So much for even pulling his wrists around under his feet so he’d have his hands in front of him.

  So much for anything. This was obviously not one of Katarina’s happy-ending adventure novels. Because in this adventure, Fred DeWitt was probably walking into a trap, Erich was the bait, and there was nothing he could do about it. Captain Yevchenko glanced at his wristwatch.

  “I imagine our friend should be arriving soon.”

  He wasn’t far off. Ten minutes later they heard footsteps coming down the hallway, crunching on broken glass. A grim-faced DeWitt — not wearing his uniform — arrived at the door just ahead of the gun barrel pointed at his back.

  “You checked him for weapons, I assume?” Captain Yevchenko pointed his own pistol at DeWitt, and Pasternov, the silent bodyguard, nodded, turned on his heels, and headed back down the hallway. Yevchenko turned his attention to his new guest.

  “Sergeant DeWitt!” Yevchenko greeted him like an old friend. “You’re even more foolish than I dared hope. And prompt, as well.”

  DeWitt wasn’t playing the game; he hurried over to Erich and began to pull off the tape that wound around his head. Erich didn’t mind losing a little hair, not at all.

  “You okay, kid?” DeWitt whispered as he removed the last of the tape and helped Erich to his feet. Erich nodded and rubbed his wrists. Yes, he was okay. But now what?

  Captain Yevchenko was obviously having his fun with this.

  “Imagine! Here you are in the Soviet sector without your uniform on. You’d be demoted down to corporal if your superiors found out, wouldn’t you? Perhaps thrown in the brig, jailed for a few months?”

  “You got that right,” growled DeWitt. He wadded up a handful of electrical tape and threw it at Yevchenko’s feet. “But I showed up. Now you let him go.”