The Bridge of Sighs

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Thank you, Comrade.”

  That word brought a sudden frown to the officer’s cheery face.

  Konrad had given him a name and address—Birgit Schlieger, Friedrichstrasse 36—with a small, hand-drawn map. Emil stopped at a corner to try and orient himself. The demolished Tiergarten was to his right. Upturned trees had been cleared, and someone had planted a few twigs to mark their passing. Along the far end, army blankets held up by sticks formed tents. The Opel hummed on the corner behind him. It was quickly becoming dark, and no lights appeared in the houses, only the faint waver of candlelight. He turned the little map ninety degrees and held it to his nose before finding where he was. Friedrichstrasse was on the opposite side of town.

  He took a long tram ride to the street—another demolished wreck—but before searching for the apartment, he stopped at a café that had a candle on each of its five tables and mildewed, yellow wallpaper peeling in the corners. He settled near the door. The Opel was nowhere to be seen, but in the corner there was a well-fed American Negro with a round face. He wore a brown overcoat and drank his coffee as if it were water. Emil stared— he’d never seen a Negro in the flesh before, skin that dark, absorbing the light like that. The American nodded pleasantly enough at Emil’s stare, then went back to the candlelit paperback novel in his hand.

  On the cover: a lurid painting of a terrified woman under a knife. The decadence, Emil supposed, of capitalism.

  He ordered coffee and a breadstick. The waitress didn’t notice his accent, or maybe by now she was all too familiar with Slavs. A couple of thin, coal-blackened men sauntered in and began drinking beer.

  He wondered if Leonek had found Lena yet. Alive, safe. He hoped. He remembered the field, Lena stretched whitely in the grass, then that white, bloodstained rug.

  The bread was dry and the coffee too watery. But finally being off his feet was something. The coffee made his stomach burn, then the bread bloated it. The two Germans were talking coal: load sizes and quotas. They talked about American C-4s flying from Hanover.

  The men worked at Tempelhof Airport, he realized, part of the gangs of Germans hired to unload the planes. He wished he could simply sneak into the compound with them, but Konrad had been clear: Trust Birgit. Absolutely. She’s devoted to the Great Red Cause. What about you? Emil had asked. Friends, he said, that’s what I’m devoted to. That, and the longest path to the grave.

  He put his money down as the waitress collected his plate. She stopped, one hand on the edge of the table, and stared at it.

  “Isn’t it enough?” asked Emil.

  She looked from the money to him, and straightened her black skirt. She spoke bitterly: “Osimarks?”

  Emil looked down at the bills. He had known this, of course, but it hadn’t occurred to him. The German workers stared; the American read his thriller. “I apologize,” said EmiL “Can I exchange here? Whatever rate you like.”

  Her eyes had narrowed to slits, and she chewed the inside of her mouth. “Just leave,” she muttered. She took his plate away.

  In the cool darkness, the whine came from everywhere. Laboring plane engines were echoed and redirected by the blasted walls and valleys of rubble. Beneath the sound, though, he could hear footsteps. Very close. Two pairs.

  The black shells of Berlin rose all around him. He couldn’t go directly to Konrad s friend, not when he was being followed, yet as he turned he was less and less sure where he was, but he pressed forward, using his cane for leverage against the uneven concrete. He heard water running and women’s voices from dark homes and children squealing. He turned onto a busy street cut down the middle by tram tracks. Berliners on foot squinted into dark shop windows. He didn’t look back, only dove into a crowd and emerged on the other side of the street, behind a sparking, packed tram, and into an alley. Deep in the blackness someone was coughing, hacking, but he turned back to face the street, waiting for the Tempelhof workers.

  “A single Mark,” came the whisper, then more coughing.

  Emil held his breath, listening to the voices from the crowded, dark street, then the heavy breaths behind. But no one came after him. He glanced back at the old man emerging from the dark. His face was splotched by lumps, some disease taking hold, and his breath was poisonous. Wiry gray hair twisted over his brow, and he started to speak again. Emil slipped back into the street.

  He found his way through the crowd again. The Germans held their thin coats tight to themselves, their eyes encircled in darkness. Planes buzzed in the distance. He couldn’t imagine how anyone slept over here.

  The Opel seemed to have vanished.

  He heard the truck before he saw it: an urgent voice calling in German. Then it was on their street, weaving around pedestrians: a truck topped by bullhorns, with Rias painted on its door. The voice shouted, “Berlinern und Berlinerin, your city is in danger!” Then it took the next corner.

  The Friedrichstrasse third-floor walk-up was a long railroad apartment with large windows on either end and none along its length. Birgit—stout, with a white bun atop her head and deflated bags for cheeks—didn’t smile much. After she introduced Emil to her fat but grinning husband, Dado, she ordered her happier, sweating half into the kitchen, where he knew to close the door.

  “Here,” she said, pointing at a scratched dining table. It was an order, so he settled down quickly. “What’s wrong with your leg?” she demanded as she sat opposite him.

  “It’s not my leg. I was shot in the stomach.”

  She nodded, unfazed. “Americans?”

  It took him a moment to understand. “No, no. Back home.”

  “Counterrevolutionaries.” She spoke as if she knew all.

  The apartment was cluttered like a grandmother’s—lace on the end tables, lace covering the sofa, lace on the shelves. He wondered how her poor grandchildren would fare. On the mottled wall was a portrait of the Comrade Chairman, his thick brown mustache like a roach on his lip. “Konrad Messer sent me.”

  “Of course he did,” she said. “Would you like some tea?”

  He shrugged.

  “Dado!” she called, her mouth stretching at the edges. “Tea!”

  He could hear Dado grunting behind the kitchen door as he stood up. Birgit smiled at him, but only briefly.

  “Konrad did this before, you know. Sent me someone from your liberated nation. I was of some small assistance. Tell me. Do you know…” She paused, touching her lower lip in thought. “Mihai, yes. General Secretary Mihai? You know him?”

  He shook his head.

  “You have friends that do.”

  “No,” he said. “The General Secretary keeps to himself.”

  This seemed to displease her. She tapped her lip, nodding absently until her eyes snapped back to him. “Do you want to get to the Tempelhof air field basement as well?”

  “Yes,” he said. “As soon as possible.”

  “It’s a simple thing for the children, you know. They’re always cutting through the fence and running wild. The Americans spend half their time rounding up little German boys.”

  He smiled obligatorily and nodded.

  She brushed some dirt from the corner of her eye. “What for?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why, then, do you want to go to Tempelhof?”

  Konrad had told him she would ask this question. He had given Emil the answer, just as he had given it to Janos months before. “For the interests of world socialism.”

  She closed her eyes and nodded sharply. This was what she had suspected; the one reason worth her efforts. Dado stumbled out of the kitchen with a metal tray and two glasses filled with hot, brackish water. His blue worker s shirt was stained by tea drippings, and his thick hands were motor-oil black. He set out the glasses with the efficiency of a drunk headwaiter, then departed.

  “Tonight?” she asked.

  The tea was unsweetened and bitter. “What?”

  “You want to get into the Tempelhof basement tonight?”

  “Oh God,
yes,” he said automatically.

  She frowned at his invocation of the deity, but slowly told him what he needed to know.

  Tempelhof Airport was shaped like a parenthesis, the planes collecting on the inside of the curve. She drew it on a piece of butcher s paper. It was a vast complex, she said, much larger than the Americans needed for their airlift, and many sections, particularly in the seven-level basement, remained unused. At the end of the war, German soldiers—boys, probably, the only ones left— laid bombs that destroyed the lowest two layers, but the remaining five were still too vast for the Americans. “This is to your advantage,” she pointed out, hovering over the pencil drawing he was barely able to make out in the candlelight. She drew five Xs for planes, then an angular line around the whole thing. “The fence. Here,” she said, marking, “is the main gate, simple enough. But your concern is the basement, the third floor down. Right here.” She drew another X at the bottom of the parenthesis, on the outside of the curve.

  Tempelhof had its own generators, so he would not be left in the dark, not like the rest of the city. “I can get you an ID and a ration card, and that will put you inside. Unlike the little boys, you’ll have to go in the front gate.” She used her chubby finger like a teacher’s pointer. “This is where you will enter the gates. With the other workers. This is where you will separate from the workers. This is where you will enter the building. Here is your storeroom. What are you looking for?”

  After all the commands, the question was unexpected. He stalled.

  “Why are you sneaking into this place?”

  “I’m looking for something,” he said finally. “A file.”

  She nodded. “You won’t tell me what.”

  “Ijust did.”

  She looked as if she didn’t believe him, and moved her teacup away from herself.

  “Did Janos Crowder go through this as well?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Comrade Crowder came before the blockade. Any fool could get onto Tempelhof. It was just a matter of waiting in a bathroom until the lights were turned off in the evening. Now…” She shook her head sadly.

  He looked at the sketch in the wavering light. This was all quite crazy. But nothing he had done in the last month had any sanity to it. He would see it through, though, because seeing it through was the only dignity left to him. He looked at her. “How did you learn all this?”

  “Nothing’s all that secret,” she confided, and smiled a second and final time. “And anyway, prostitutes know everything, haven’t you ever heard that?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  *******************

  At the busy, dark street, he boarded an overcrowded tram marked tempelhof. Simple enough. Her directions had been specific and concise, with little possibility for deviation. Emil had one foot inside the car; the other hung out. His bare hands and face froze in the night breeze, and the strain of holding himself up was wrenching his guts. An old man packed inside looked down at Emil’s foot, then shrugged helplessly.

  They went through all of Berlin, it seemed. In some areas there was solely rubble, while in others the only damage consisted of chipped façades. But most of the bits of Berlin he could see through the darkness were a mix of the two. Jagged walls rose into the air, surrounded by hills of broken stone and intact homes. Occasionally, men in suits rode bicycles alongside the tram, and their car stopped a few times to let convoys of American jeeps pass.

  Finally, at the end of a long, bomb-riddled square, beside a gated subway stop, he saw the sign: an arrow beside the words air port tempelhof. Everyone got off with him.

  The whine was continuous here, and deafening.

  Workers collected at the high chain-link fence. A few American soldiers stood on either side of the gates and took a look at each man’s ration card and ID. Beyond them, the black wall of the airport rose. There were maybe a hundred men here, stuffed tight, and Emil was in the midst of them, their hard jackets scraping his chapped fingers, their stench filling his nose. He wondered if bathing was a luxury here. The old man from the tram noticed him, his white-furred chin shifting as he spoke: “So you held on, did you?”

  Emil nodded and smiled.

  The old man moved closer, eyes glimmering from the electric lights on poles along the fence. “Usually, I’m the afternoon, but they took me off. How do you get used to these hours?”

  Emil shrugged and rubbed his arms for warmth.

  The old man nodded with lips pressed tight, and looked around. They all moved up a few feet, then stopped.

  Emil’s stomach began to act up again. His accent was a badge here.

  They moved a few more feet. A plane roared off from the other side of the terminal, and another plane’s tires screeched against the runway. The electric lights lit the men from above, casting their faces in long shadow. The old man looked like death. “My daughter-in-law says they’re flying in their own prostitutes for the GIs. Direct from Paris.” He winked. “I hope we can unload some of that”

  Some other men growled their agreement, and a short, wiry worker took off his cap. “Madame, pourrais-je vous aider à descendre de cette échelle?” He held up a hand and squeezed, as though supporting a woman’s ass. The laughter rippled through the crowd, and the little man, pleased, put his cap back on.

  They were almost at the front. Three American soldiers, looking very stern in the shadows of their caps, examined each ID closely, twisting it in the light, and then stared deeply into each face. Back to the photo, then the face, again.

  Emil would not get through. He knew this as soon as he looked again at his ID card with Schlieger, Dado beneath the picture: dark hair, dark eyes, double chin. Even accounting for weight loss, this could never be him. What was Birgit thinking? What was he thinking, letting her talk him into this?

  He put away the papers and turned around. The old man put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re almost there.”

  Emil shook it off and didn’t look back, but said, “I forgot something.”

  As soon as the words came out he went numb, but pressed on. There were eyes on him, white eyes against dirty cheeks. Their faces were slack in their momentary surprise, then, when he was nearly out of their mass, shoulders began bumping into his. “Russiancame whispered German voices, hot breath in his ear. White teeth flashed. He pushed forward, just breaking free. Warm spittle hit the side of his neck. He didn’t wipe it off. They were yelling at him, hoarse voices in the cold. He walked faster, the cane helping him gallop further into the darkness. He didn’t look back until he had crossed the street, and the screaming airplanes obscured their shouting. They raised fists, a cloud of hot words hovered above their heads, and occasionally one broke from the crowd a few paces and spat, but they did not follow. They remained beside the gate, waiting to work for their ration cards. The promise of food held them right where they were.

  A cold, black drizzle fell as he hobbled along the outside of the fence. He was cold all the way through. His jacket was thin— worker materials, the Uzbek would say—and when a wind came along, his battered hat blew off, and he had to stumble after it. He reached the other side of the Tempelhof complex, where he could see the activity inside the parenthesis. There were some children up ahead watching a plane touch down—a black silhouette marked by lights and sparks behind the propellers. Trucks burdened with food and coal rolled across the wet runway. From the shadows tiny workers jogged toward a parked truck. A burst of voices shot out—hooting—and the children clung to the chain- links, shouting with pleasure. Little blond boys dressed as poor adults, or in family lederhosen. They trembled like eager puppies.The plane taxied, disappearing on the other side of the airport, and another immediately touched down. There were lights in the sky, more planes lining up for the descent. On the ground, figures loaded trucks with the feverish single-mindedness of the hungry. The children whistled. Emil stood at the fence beside them, hands in his pockets fingering the useless ID.

  “What kind of plane is that?” he said, and the
y looked at him. The plane was empty now, moving to the line of those waiting to leave. Another one took off.

  There were five of them, feverish with the excitement of big machines, and one with mud on his cheek blurted, “C-47.” He seemed very convinced of it.

  Emil nodded at the fence. “And this one coming in?”

  “I’ll bet it s a C-54,” said another boy.

  “You can t tell,” said the first, wiping the mud away with the back of his hand. “You can’t see it.”

  “I can see it as well as you,” came the bitter reply.

  It was, in fact, a C-82—a rare bird, they all agreed. He asked how often they saw the planes up close, and the first boy proudly said, “Whenever we want.”

  “Shut up” whispered another.

  The first boy realized then what he had done. His confused silence endured as he wondered how to talk himself out of his slip, but he finally gave up. “Everyone does it.”

  “Seen any C-4s?” Emil asked conversationally, as if he hadn’t understood the slip. “There were some around earlier.”

  The rain had stopped, and the boys seemed to want to leave. They retreated a few steps, but one—the smallest, a dark-haired child with perfectly combed hair and immaculate lederhosen— asked if he had a cigarette.

  Emil squatted and pulled out his pack. The others approached as he distributed them. When he offered them lights the first boy shook his head. “They’ll see us. Want to know how to see them up close?”

  The littlest made some sound of discontent, but another gave an unimpressed sigh that shut him up. “Baby

  It was another fifty yards farther along the fence. In the darkness one of them tripped, but bounced upright again and ran to catch up. They had marked the spot with two sticks crossed on the ground. At first Emil didn’t see anything—it was a fence and two sticks, and on the other side the wet tarmac led toward the planes and, to the left, the Tempelhof building. But then the first boy, with a smile Emil could just make out, touched the fence, demonstrating that the chain links had been cut along a jagged vertical line, about three feet high. The boy bent and pushed through—there was the sound of his shirt tearing—and looked back, beaming. “Come on in!”