A Night Divided

by Jennifer A. Nielsen

  God preserve me from my friends, I can deal with my enemies. -- German proverb

  Mama wouldn't allow Fritz and me to go back to the tunnel the next day, not even to garden. But Officer Muller had warned us that time was our enemy, and so I decided even if there was something small I could do to help, I would.

  We needed to know how wide the Death Strip was, and the only place I could get a decent view of it was from Anna's bedroom window. Somehow, I had to beg, swindle, or steal my way inside.

  Fritz drew me a picture that explained how to estimate the distance of the strip. The Berlin Wall was three and a half meters high. I had to look at it and pretend it was laid out flat on the ground. Then I had to imagine another wall behind it, and so on across the entire Death Strip.

  "Try to be as accurate as you can," he whispered in my ear. "But if you are going to make any errors, estimate a distance wider than we need. The worst possible mistake is for us to come to the surface inside the Death Strip."

  Since Mama didn't know about Anna's and my dissolved friendship, she gladly gave permission for me to visit her. I knew she believed seeing Anna would weaken my resolve to leave East Berlin, but if anything, it would be just the opposite.

  My pulse was racing when I knocked on Anna's door. Despite the great number of laws I had broken over the past few weeks, none of them caused me anywhere near the guilt that I felt now.

  I had nothing to offer Anna as either a gift or an apology. And although I was bathed and my hair was combed and I was in one of my few remaining nice outfits, I felt unnatural, as if the sweat and dirt I earned each day in the tunnel had become the real me.

  Anna's mother answered the door and at first didn't seem at all pleased to see me. But she called for Anna, and then with a voice like an icicle, she invited me in.

  There, I was in her apartment, though I had only been allowed in as far as the front door. I could see Anna's bedroom from here, but that wasn't good enough. And once in there, I needed time to look out the window. That would require several uninterrupted minutes.

  "Hello." Anna entered the front room and stopped far short of where I stood. She looked as uncomfortable as I felt, but since I had come to her home, it was my job to repair things.

  "Can we talk somewhere?" I asked. In her room would've been nice, but I couldn't ask for too much too fast. Besides, now that I was here with her, I really did want us to talk.

  Anna awkwardly motioned me toward her couch. I followed her there and we sat on either end, so close and yet it felt as though an ocean divided us. Or a wall.

  I started. "You came to help on the garden and I wouldn't let you. I've thought about that a lot since then. I'm sorry."

  "You've changed, Gerta," Anna said. "You're frustrated or angry all the time. You're jumpy around others, and distant. It's almost like you're --"

  "Like I'm what?" I hoped she wouldn't accuse me of trying to escape, because I'd have to deny it and I really didn't want to lie to her anymore. But I had to ask.

  Anna frowned. "Like you're unhappy, I suppose."

  "I miss being your friend," I said softly. That wasn't a lie.

  "Do you?" she asked. "Because sometimes I think you do, and then other times it's like you don't want me anywhere near you."

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I wish you could understand."

  "I want that too." Anna looked sideways at me. "Is there anything you can say to me, to explain anything?"

  The way she emphasized the final word worried me. Was she asking me to explain my odd behavior over the last several weeks? Because the answer involved telling her the biggest secret of my life, and I could never reveal that.

  Anna's mother came into the room to dust and Anna quietly rolled her eyes at me. I understood. This was a tough conversation and having an adult in the room didn't make things any easier. She stood and motioned for me to follow her. My heart jumped. We were going to her room.

  I would've been more excited, except that I couldn't help but feel like a traitor in the face of her trusting attitude. She wanted a chance to repair our friendship. But I was only here as a clumsy sort of spy.

  Anna's room was the same as it had always been: simple and sparse, and painted in a cream color that somehow reflected gray. I'd always thought of it as boring, even depressing, but Anna seemed to like the simplicity. As soon as I entered, my eyes went directly to her window, but the curtains were closed.

  "It feels dark in here." It was a ridiculous thing to say, considering that her curtains were white and plenty of light shone through, but I was committed to it now. I sat at the head of her bed, where I'd have the best view. She took my hint and widened the curtains, though from my current angle, I couldn't see as much as I wanted.

  "How do you enjoy gardening?" she asked.

  Pulling my attention from the window, I shrugged. "It's not as fun as I thought it'd be. It could be a long time before we see if anything grows."

  "If you ever see it." I did a double take, but Anna only smoothed out her bed cover. "I mean, since you planted so late in the year."

  "Right." I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this conversation. Our friendship was hanging on by threads, and there was nothing I could do to change that. I was here for one reason only. First, I had to get Anna out of the room.

  It required me to abandon my pride, but it had to be done. "The problem is we haven't had much to eat for a while."

  Anna responded just as I knew she would. "Do you want something to eat now? We have plenty of food."

  "Maybe a sandwich?" I suggested. That would take some time to make. It also sounded truly wonderful.

  "Okay." As Anna slid off her bed and left, I went to work.

  I made sure her door was shut and then crossed to her window. I could see the top corner of the Welcome Building from here, but not all the way to the ground. That was a relief. It meant she couldn't be spying on us, if that was ever her intention. If I stood at just the right angle, my view of the Death Strip was better than what I'd expected. In fact, there was a dark area inside the Death Strip that was probably very close to where we were tunneling. That made it easier to know where to measure.

  Fritz said the wall was three and a half meters high, about one and a half times his height. In my mind, I laid it out flat. That was three and a half meters into the Death Strip. I imagined another one behind it, and then another and another. I'd glanced at this area several times before but never really considered how much wider it was than I thought. When I stood in the tunnel, I imagined us being at least halfway across, and maybe even more. But we weren't anywhere near that far.

  Another length of wall went down in my mind, and another. The farther I went, the harder it was to be sure of my distances. So much of the open area looked the same as everywhere around it, and no matter where I stood, I was still at an odd angle. In fact, I might've lost track altogether if I didn't have that dark patch of ground to keep me oriented.

  "Gerta?"

  I swerved away from the window, so startled that I jumped, which must have looked very odd to Anna. Her eyebrows pressed low. "What are you doing?"

  "Nothing important." I shut the curtain and walked over to take the sandwich from her. My mouth was full with the first bite when I added, "Thank you for the food."

  "There's more I can do to help," Anna said. "My mother talked to me just now. We know a lot of your clothes have been ruined in the garden this summer, and there's some things I've outgrown." She walked over and opened her small closet. "Would it offend you to take any of the things I can't use?"

  She started to pull some outfits from her closet, but my focus was on a pair of her boots on the floor. Not the brown pair she had worn when she visited me in the garden patch before, but her usual black ones. Clumps of mud still clung to the soles and what was dry had flaked off onto the floor. I had seen so much dirt in the last few weeks that if there was anything I could recognize, it was the dark soil we had tunneled out from beneath the Welcome Building.
r />   Anna had been to the garden patch recently. Maybe she had gone farther than that.

  I forgot about the clothes Anna was laying out on the bed, and even about the sandwich in my hand.

  "I need to go," I announced, already halfway to her door. "I forgot ... something."

  "Gerta, don't -- where are you going?" Anna called after me.

  "Home."

  "I'm sorry. Was it the clothes? Did I do something wrong?"

  Oh yes, she certainly had. But behind her innocent facade she had to know this wasn't about the clothes. I'd always known there was a risk of someone I knew becoming a spy against us. But never in a million years would I have expected it to be Anna. There was no longer any question of our friendship. All that remained was to wonder just how much of an enemy she had become.

  A disaster seldom comes alone. -- German proverb

  My tears had dried by the time I told Fritz the story shortly afterward. Which was a good thing because he wasn't showing much sympathy for whether I held on to a friend I was going to abandon soon anyway.

  His larger concern was for the dirt on Anna's boots. "Are you sure the mud was on different boots than when she came to see us before?"

  "Positive. The mud wasn't that old. Not over a day, I'd bet."

  "You should've asked her about it."

  "Asked her what, exactly?" I retorted. "If she knows about the tunnel? If she's going to turn us in to the Stasi? Because I didn't need to say a word. The answer to both questions is pretty obvious!"

  "Okay, calm down." Fritz and I were in the basement of our own apartment building. This was our new sanctuary since Frau Eberhart patrolled the sidewalks and since we weren't yet sure which was more dangerous inside our own apartment: the microphones or Mama. "We have to assume that Anna knows, and that sooner or later, she's going to tell someone. Whether it's the Stasi or not, it'll eventually get back to them."

  "Muller will come with them." My voice wavered, revealing too much of my fear of him. "He already told us what he'll do when that happens."

  "Then we have to finish. Fast." Fritz paced a moment, then finally sighed and shook his head. "Did you get a chance to measure the Death Strip?"

  "Sort of. Anna came in before I'd finished, but I got a good start. It was hard because I got distracted a couple of times, and I thought --"

  "How wide?"

  "One hundred meters."

  Fritz let out a low whistle and almost staggered to a nearby crate where he could sit down. "We're not even halfway." He cursed and kicked at another box next to him.

  Hoping to keep his spirits up, I said, "Let's dig it smaller, then. We can walk that distance hunched over, or even crawl through."

  "That'll help," Fritz said. "But we need to take weeks off our time, not days. What if we ask Officer Muller to dig with us?"

  "We can't trust him -- he told us that himself!" I shook my head fiercely. "With a shovel in one hand and a gun in the other, which will he use when Anna calls the other officers to check out the tunnel?"

  "You told me that you got distracted," Fritz said. "Maybe you were off on your count."

  "I might be off by a few meters, but not twenty or thirty! And I know I was accurate almost to the halfway point because there was this dark spot in the strip, almost where our tunnel ended." For the first time, I thought about the chance of that, of a dark spot so close to the tunnel. That couldn't be a coincidence.

  Fritz had caught on as well. "What do you mean, a dark spot?"

  "I saw it from far away, and that's just what it looked like at the time." My breaths became shallow as I realized what I must have seen. "But I don't think it's a spot. It might be a shadow. I think the ground is sinking where we've dug it."

  Fritz leapt to his feet. "C'mon. We've got to go and see it for ourselves!"

  Even as I followed him, I said, "We're not allowed to go there. Mama doesn't --"

  "There's no time to explain!"

  "If the tunnel collapses while we're inside, or if the Grenzers notice the dark spot and come to investigate" -- I shuddered -- "either way, we're dead."

  The only exception that I could see was if Mama figured out we had gone to the tunnel in defiance of her orders. Then we wouldn't have to worry about the Grenzers. She'd get to us first and do worse than the police ever could.

  Fritz and I hurried along the street, got to the block that emptied into the back lot for the Welcome Building, and then crept along the wall to get inside. I wished we could just peek through the wall from here. Carve out a hole big enough to see if we had left our own "X marks the spot" for our secret beneath that ground.

  But we would have to content ourselves with entering the tunnel and looking for any sign that the ground was sinking. My biggest worry was that from within the tunnel, the collapse wouldn't be noticeable. If we couldn't find it, then we couldn't fix it.

  I scanned the roof of the tunnel. Instantly, everything became suspicious to me. Why was one area lower than elsewhere? Exposed rock jutted out overhead and to my left. Was it new? So far, everything looked how it had when he dug this section, Fritz assured me. But that didn't make me feel any better.

  We finally found the sunken area at the end of the tunnel, around where the pipe had been nicked. Endless liters of water had sprayed so powerfully here, we probably should've expected it to affect the ground's stability overhead.

  "We'll be caught for sure," Fritz said.

  "Maybe Officer Muller can explain it away." I didn't necessarily believe he would, but maybe it was the best of the few horrible options we still had.

  "How deep did the dark spot look?"

  "I dunno," I answered. "Not very. But it does look different from the area around it."

  "Maybe we can brace it up. Or at least do something to keep it from falling any farther."

  "How?"

  Fritz already had the answer. "I'm a bricklayer. I can build supports overhead, maybe even raise some places if the ground is still soft enough. But the brick will be expensive and too suspicious to purchase."

  "There's brick upstairs!" I said. "Maybe even a bag of mortar too."

  "Then I'll get started right away," Fritz said. "Help me get it carried downstairs."

  I was already on my way.

  The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. -- Albert Camus, French author

  Dinnertime was coming soon and Fritz and I were debating what to do. Mama would be expecting us for supper. If we didn't show up, her initial worries would turn to anger when she realized why we were late.

  On the other hand, her anger was inevitable now. The instant we came home, she would know we had disobeyed her. And even if we tried to explain why, neither of us was sure the reasons would matter to her. Nothing we'd already said mattered anyway. Besides that, we had spent the last several hours at a mad pace getting brick loaded into the tunnel, mortar mixed up, and finding tools and supports that we could use. To avoid having to build frames overhead, Fritz was mortaring together larger sections of brick on the ground. He said it'd be several hours before they were dry enough that he could lift them into place, but we had plenty of work to do until then.

  "I'll go home and explain to Mama," I offered. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I'd rather have faced an angry bear right now, but Mama needed to know where we were, and Fritz had to stay here and keep working.

  He looked down at me and nodded. "She's only doing what she thinks is right for us, Gerta. Try to remember that."

  "One of her children is on the other side. And her husband!"

  "Yes, and he would be the first to agree with her. Papa will be happy if we make it to the other side, but Mother is right -- he would never want us taking this risk."

  Fritz reached out for another brick in his stack and I handed it to him. "What do I tell Mama, then?"

  Fritz sighed. "Tell her that we love her, and that it'll break our hearts if she doesn't come with us. B
ut you and I are going to finish this tunnel."

  It had never occurred to me that Mama might not come with us. Tears burned my eyes at the possibility. I couldn't be happy without her in the west any more than I could be happy in the east without my father. Somehow, I had to make her come.

  Fritz dug away at the wall and inserted a brick deep into the dirt. That would hold up the wider stacks he'd already mortared. Fritz figured they would brace the dirt until we were able to finish the tunnel.

  My thoughts drifted back to Anna. How long had she known our secret? And how much longer until she finally decided to tell? Time was running out for us. I could feel it, probably the same way my father had felt it days before the wall went up.

  "This might help support the dirt," Fritz said as he examined the sunken area again. "But I don't see how we can lift it so it doesn't get worse. That dark patch on the Death Strip is going to remain there. If they run a patrol through there, they'll figure out what caused it."

  "You can slide wood planks above the bricks to lift it," someone behind us said.

  Startled, both Fritz and I turned. It was my mother's voice, firm and commanding. I couldn't quite read the expression on her face. It wasn't anger or fear or even disappointment -- thank goodness for that, because I could withstand my mother's anger and knew how to calm her fears. But the times in my life when I had disappointed her still felt like unhealed wounds. Now Mama held a flashlight aimed toward the ceiling. Over her arm was a sack filled with food. My recent days of hunger had fine-tuned my sense of smell, and I always knew now when food was nearby.

  I stared at her, completely unsure of what to do next. I hated to disobey her but I would if I had to. Nothing was more important than keeping this tunnel from caving in.

  Mama seemed almost rigid, making every effort not to touch the walls or look up at the dirt ceiling. "I didn't bring you much to eat because we don't have much." Her voice was as near to stone as her body. "And I thought it would be all right once I started back to work today. But when I got there, they demoted me."

  "Because of us?" I asked.

  Mama sniffed and shook her head. "While I was with Oma Gertrude, they started looking into some letters I'd written to your father years ago. They said it was evidence that I was still divided in my loyalties. I told them that he was my husband and of course I was loyal to him. They offered to help me divorce him, but I won't do that. So I was given a much lower job as a consequence. What they'll pay me now won't begin to cover our rent, or our food, or anything else."