Life Behind the Wall

by Robert Elmer

  Willi rubbed his chin and thought for a moment, then nodded and shook her hand. “For freedom,” he said, echoing her words. Time to get down to business.

  “So how much money do you have?” she asked him. “We’re going to need it to make this plan work.”

  And the plan would work just fine, as long as Uncle Heinz didn’t hear her leave the apartment.

  “Who’s that?” he mumbled from his dark corner.

  Sabine quietly pulled her little backpack on, glad no one had turned on the light.

  “Just Sabine,” she whispered. “I’m going down the hall.”

  Which was true, and nighttime visits to the washroom at the end of the hall weren’t unusual. She waited a moment at the door, wondering if her uncle would respond. He just grunted and launched back into his snoring. Good. Now she just had to get out of the building and down the street without anybody else stopping her.

  “You’d better be there, Willi Stumpff,” she whispered as she slipped onto the dark street. The stairs didn’t stop her, though she had to admit it took her a little longer to take them one at a time. But now she didn’t stop long enough to let goose bumps climb the back of her neck. She just might turn around and scurry back to bed rather than make her way to the bombed-out apartment building on Bergstrasse.

  What was that? Someone coming down the street? Sabine dived into the shadows, crutches and all. A dog barked, and a door slammed.

  But no one came toward her.

  After a minute, she breathed again and picked up her backpack. Keep going. There it is. She slipped through the crumbled entry and felt her way into the maze of rooms.

  “Willi?” she whispered. Losing her concentration for a moment, she tripped over a loose brick but caught herself before falling on her face. When she looked up, she could make out a flickering light up ahead.

  “So I finally get to see this car of yours,” Willi announced from the shadows. Light from his candle glittered and reflected off his glasses, casting weird shapes on the broken walls around them.

  “There you are,” she greeted him. “I was afraid you weren’t going to show.”

  “Didn’t I say I would be here?”

  “Yeah, but — ”

  “Or did you think I was too blind to find my way around the neighborhood?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  He just smiled and pulled a little round compass out of his pocket, holding it up to the light.

  “I don’t get too lost. But where’s your car?”

  “All right, Mr. Boy Scout.” She led the way to the trapdoor. Five minutes later, Willi walked all around the Volkswagen, leaning closer with the candle for a better look.

  “Whoa.” He whistled. “Too bad it doesn’t have an engine, or wheels, or a windshield, or . . . let’s see. What does it have?”

  “It has seats. But now you’ve seen it. Did you bring the stuff?”

  “Patience. I brought it.” He unloaded his own small backpack. “One hundred eighty-seven sheets of paper. That’s all I could find in my father’s office. And the ink. What about you?”

  Sabine pulled out her box.

  “It has three different sizes of letters, and they snap together like this, see?” She showed him how the printing kit worked, the one she’d bought with Willi’s money at the Schreibwarenhandlung. The stationery store owner had even shown her how to work it. “First, you arrange all the little rubber letters into words. Next, you ink the letters up with the roller, then you press it against the paper like so.”

  “An underground printing press.”

  “Just like in this book I read about the Danish underground movement,” she told him as she started sorting letters. “They did this kind of thing during World War Two.”

  “Another book, huh?” He picked up one of the novels she’d left in the car before tossing it back. “Let’s just figure out what we’re going to say and get out of here.”

  “How about Liebe Freiheit, Keine Mauer?” Sabine asked.

  “ ‘Up with Freedom, Down with the Wall!’ Yeah, I like it.”

  Sabine set up the headline while Willi worked on the rest.

  “Done yet?” she asked him five minutes later.

  “Come on. You just have four words. I have forty.”

  “You can do it.”

  “Didn’t say I couldn’t. How about this: ‘We must protest until the wall comes back down.’ Does that sound — ”

  “Perfect.” And for the next hour, they printed sheet after sheet of their protest papers.

  “Hey, we’re getting pretty good at this,” Willi told her as they worked their way through the paper supply.

  Well, sort of. Some looked smudged, others crooked, but they kept working. Roll ink on the letters, press against the paper, peel it off . . . paper after paper.

  Willi brought his hand up to meet a yawn, and Sabine giggled. Even in the candlelight, she could see the inky fingerprints on his cheek.

  “We’re done,” Sabine announced as she pulled the last paper off. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Don’t know; don’t want to know.” Willi gathered a handful of papers. “Let’s just get this over with. But — ” He hesitated. “What about that guy, Wolfgang, who’s always watching you from his apartment window?”

  “What about him? Most of the time he’s there; sometimes he’s not.”

  “Have you actually ever met him?”

  “You don’t want to know, Willi.” She pushed away the memory of Wolfgang waiting for her at the foot of the stairs.

  “Well, maybe he’s asleep.”

  And maybe not. Sabine just followed Willi up the stairway and back to her neighborhood. She held her breath, but Wolfgang’s window looked dark; nothing moved.

  “Up there?” Willi followed her gaze, and she nodded. If Wolfgang were watching, well . . . Sabine squared her shoulders and prayed he wasn’t. They still had work to do.

  Their first stop: the townhouse apartments down her street. Sabine felt a tingle as she slipped the first few leaflets under the doors. What would people think when they read them?

  Willi had crossed to the other side of the street, working his way toward Sabine’s apartment at twice her speed.

  Willi! She wanted to scream but could only freeze in terror and melt into a dark doorway. A Vopo policeman had rounded a corner, and Willi had stumbled right into his path. Though the boy wiggled and protested, the Vopo held him tightly. Sabine’s heart nearly beat out of her chest as she tried to think.

  But Willi acted; he planted a good kick in one of the man’s shins — just enough to loosen his grip. In a heartbeat, Willi whirled free and sprinted down the sidewalk, leaving the policeman in a cloud of flying protest papers.

  “Halt!” The Vopo drew his gun, but he was still hopping in pain. Willi had already darted around a corner.

  Sabine stared in amazement. That kid could get around! He couldn’t see clearly ten feet in front of his own face, but he could run like the wind.

  Sabine’s grin melted, and she nearly choked when the Vopo seemed to look straight at her, as if he could hear her heart beating.

  Could he? She stood lamppost-still in the dark, not breathing, not blinking. She still clutched the “Up with Freedom, Down with the Wall!” papers that would send her straight to jail. She could only watch as the man lit a match and held it to a stack of their papers. When he seemed satisfied that they would burn, he tossed the whole lot in the gutter.

  Sabine buried her face in the brick wall as a flickering light groped the shadows. Surely he would discover her. She waited silently, the blood pounding in her ears, the sound of the Vopo’s laugh echoing down the street. She could not fight and run, the way Willi had. But maybe if she screamed someone would help her. Maybe Mama would even hear her. Armed with a plan, she turned to face the Vopo —

  Who had disappeared. She caught her breath and looked down the street.

  No one. All he’d left behind were paper ashes and a few embers, flick
ering orange reminders of their protest. She walked over and poked the burned pile with her crutch. All that work —

  Sadly, she straightened up and instinctively looked over her shoulder at Wolfgang’s window. Did the curtain move? She didn’t wait to check. She and Willi would just have to think of a better way to get people’s attention.

  She just had to slip back into her apartment without waking anyone up. She couldn’t help yawning as she realized how long she’d been awake. This felt like the longest trip down the hall she’d ever made. As she quietly entered the apartment, she immediately knew something wasn’t right.

  Aunt Gertrud’s voice hissed out of the darkness. “Where have you been all this time?”

  Sabine squinted as the probing beam of a flashlight searched out her face. At least she’d slipped the leftover flyers into her backpack.

  “Oh, it’s you.” Sabine yawned like Miss Innocent, ignoring her aunt’s question. “I was just going back to bed.”

  “You most certainly were not down the hall all this — ” began Aunt Gertrud. Another sleepy voice interrupted.

  “Sabine?” her mother asked. “What’s all the noise?”

  “Sorry to wake you,” Sabine whispered as she used the chance to get into her bed. She pulled the sheets to her chin and decided she could take off her shoes later. Hugging her backpack under the sheets, she closed her eyes.

  With a disgusted sigh, Aunt Gertrud switched off the flashlight and shuffled back to bed.

  And Sabine did her best to keep from shaking.

  9

  KAPITEL NEUN

  VISIT FROM THE STASI

  “What about all the printing stuff?” asked Willi, and Sabine shushed him. She waited a moment while a doctor hurried by, his white smock rustling.

  “It’s still safe down in the bunker, if we need it again.”

  “What?” Willi leaned closer to hear.

  “I said — ”

  A hospital orderly gave them a curious look as he walked by pushing a laundry cart. Sabine recognized him, one of her brother Erich’s friends. Dietrich, wasn’t it? He smiled at them. But after a quick nod, she turned away so he wouldn’t hear her response to Willi.

  “Listen,” she said as she pulled him back into a corner stacked high with white sheets and thin blue hospital blankets. “We have to come up with a better plan.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “That was a little too close last — ”

  “Hey, there you are!” Erich walked up and ruffled Sabine’s hair. She’d tried to duck but was too late.

  “What do the doctors say about Oma?” she asked, not sure she wanted the real answer.

  Erich’s shoulders fell a bit.

  “You see her, same as the doctors. She’s getting a little worse each day. But she’s hanging on — ”

  Sabine nodded. She kept hoping the news would change for the better.

  “Can you do me a favor?” he asked. “I need you to carry a message home for me.”

  Sabine couldn’t help yawning as she nodded.

  “Late night, huh? Well, just tell Mutti that I have to work a bit late, but I should be home by seven. Can you remember that?”

  “By seven,” she repeated. Late again?

  Dietrich came back down the hall, this time with his arms full of blankets.

  “Hey, back to work!” he teased, a smile breaking through his long face. “Or have we gone on strike today?”

  “That’s it!” Sabine snapped her fingers and grabbed Willi’s arm. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it!”

  “Did I say something?” Dietrich asked them.

  “Gotta go,” Sabine said. She tugged on Willi’s sleeve and started toward the exit. She stopped only long enough to wave to Erich and the puzzled orderly.

  “Already I don’t like it,” Willi protested, following her. He tried to put on the brakes when they got to the street, but Sabine had set her course and had no intention of slowing down.

  “You can’t not like it. You haven’t even heard my idea.”

  “I don’t need to hear it. I just know that it’s going to get us in trouble, like we were in last night.”

  “Oh, come on. Remember our pact? This is foolproof. Now, here’s the plan — ”

  A half hour later, Sabine repeated the steps in her head as they neared their first target. They’d find plenty of people, probably cranky in the summer heat, standing in lines this time of day. For eggs, one line. For meat, another line. For carrots, yet another line. Working people, on their way home. Perfect. But could she convince Willi?

  “You really think everybody’s just going to agree? ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea, we hate the wall too.’ Why would they go along with this — ”

  “This brilliant idea?” she finished. She stepped aside as an older woman hurried out a shop door, bells tinkling. “Of course they’ll go along with it. Everyone hates the way we live in this half of Berlin. Everyone hates these lines. And everyone hates the wall. All they need is someone to tell them what to do.”

  “Baa.” Willi did his sheep imitation just under his breath, and Sabine elbowed him as they entered the shop. But he knew what to do, and like a good soldier, he shuffled into one of the lines. Sabine took her place in the other.

  At the front of Sabine’s line, a squat, frowning man studied his tiny piece of sausage. The butcher hadn’t given him enough meat to feed a toy poodle. And so Sabine made her first move, planting one of her crutches far enough into the aisle to trip the retreating customer.

  “Entschuldige!” she whispered, afraid to look up. “Excuse me. But did you hear about the strike tomorrow? No one is going to work. To protest the . . . wall.”

  What else could she say? The man’s worn leather shoes paused for a moment next to her crutch then stepped carefully around and continued out the door. When she finally looked up, Willi shrugged and gave her an “oh, well” look. His turn came as a middle-aged woman approached from the head of his line.

  “We’re having a strike,” he blurted out, way too loudly. A couple of people turned, eyebrows raised, and his cheeks flamed red — as if he’d just belched, or worse. “That is, I mean — ”

  The woman breezed by him. But an older woman ahead of him crossed her arms and turned to face him. She seemed almost as wide as she was tall.

  “What are you babbling about, boy?”

  He glanced at Sabine before taking a deep breath to answer.

  “A strike. You know. No working. To protest . . . lousy food. And the w-w-wall.”

  The woman just glared at him for a long moment, then she harrumphed and turned her back on him.

  And so it went: at the metzgerladen that had little meat, at the bäckerei that offered little bread, at the milchladen that had almost no milk. When Sabine and Willi got kicked out of one shop, they tried another. And another. But in the end, it didn’t seem to matter. Sabine grew more and more discouraged as everyone responded like sheep, sheep, sheep.

  “What is wrong with these people?” she demanded. After an hour, even Sabine had to admit that her plan wouldn’t work.

  “I don’t know.” Willi shook his head and started counting on his fingers. “I had about a dozen people walk by like I didn’t exist, even more who just growled or gave me what I can only guess were dirty looks, and at least eight who threatened to call the police.”

  “And you did better than I did.” Sabine batted a chunk of concrete from the sidewalk with her crutch, sending it skittering into the strasse like a hockey puck. “But at least we didn’t get thrown in jail.”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, Sabine, but I’m done.” He turned off at his corner. “Pact or no pact. Maybe I’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow.”

  She nodded and let her shoes drag on the sidewalk, even though her mother always told her not to. It scuffed the sides and the toes. Maybe she would just end up like Anne Frank — captured by the soldiers in the end. As she rounded the corner of her floor’s hallway, she froze at the sight of two m
en in dark leather coats leaving Frau Finkenkrug’s apartment.

  Stasi! One of them slammed the door shut.

  “Republikflucht,” muttered the other one, a tall man with a goatee just like Comrade Ulbricht’s. They obviously hadn’t noticed Sabine — yet. So she backed up as quickly as she dared. Before she backed around the corner, she silently watched the men apply an official-looking red seal to the wood just above the doorknob. It was obviously meant to keep anyone from opening the apartment again soon. As if Frau Finkenkrug had come down with some kind of terrible sickness, like smallpox or black death.

  But Sabine knew better. She liked the sound of that word: Republikflucht. Flight from the Republic. The frau had escaped! And it would sound even better if people would say it of her and her mother.

  “Come on,” she heard one of the men say.

  “We’re going to be here all night if we don’t get these interviews done soon.”

  She heard the men rap sharply on Herr Gruhn’s door, hardly waiting for the old man to answer before they pushed their way inside. Sabine knew the pattern: the Stasi would search each apartment, looking until they found something they could use as an excuse to arrest someone, to blame that person for helping the frau escape. A radio tuned to the wrong station? A piece of forbidden Westliteratur, like a magazine from the other side of the border? That would be enough. Sabine shivered. When she heard Herr Gruhn’s door close, she hurried past it to her door.

  “Mama!” she whispered as she pushed inside. “Your fashion magazines! They’re coming!”

  Frau Becker dropped her spoon in the soup kettle and ran to snatch up the forbidden literature. Sabine could think of nothing more silly than hiding magazines from the Stasi. She hardly had time to grab two magazines off the table and replace them with a couple of Communist brochures — the kind Uncle Heinz brought home from his tractor factory — before the familiar sharp knock on the door made her jump.

  “Um Himmels willen!” Aunt Gertrud declared, stumbling out of the front room. She looked as if she’d just rolled out of bed. “Heavens! Who is making all that noise?”

  She froze in horror when the two Stasi pushed the door open.