ALSO BY JESPER BUGGE KOLD
Winter Men
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 Jesper Bugge Kold
Translation copyright © 2017 K. E. Semmel
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Land i datid by Turbine DK in Denmark in 2016. Translated from Danish by K. E. Semmel. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2017.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
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ISBN-13: 9781503937284
ISBN-10: 1503937283
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
For Karina, Malte, and Elvira
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
1 PETER
2 ANDREAS
3 PETER
4 ANDREAS
5 PETER
6 ANDREAS
7 STEFAN
8 PETER
9 ANDREAS
10 PETER
11 ANDREAS
12 STEFAN
13 PETER
14 ANDREAS
15 PETER
16 ANDREAS
17 PETER
18 STEFAN
19 PETER
20 ANDREAS
21 STEFAN
22 ANDREAS
23 STEFAN
24 PETER
25 ANDREAS
26 PETER
27 ANDREAS
28 PETER
29 ANDREAS
30 STEFAN
31 PETER
32 ANDREAS
33 PETER
34 ANDREAS
35 PETER
36 STEFAN
37 ANDREAS
38 STEFAN
39 ANDREAS
40 PETER
41 ANDREAS
42 PETER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
PROLOGUE
Berlin, October 2006
The droplets fall where the boys’ wet soccer ball had thumped against the asphalt. They drip from the shaft of the knife. The knife is drawn out, and his blood flows thick and dark. His energy drains from him, both slowly and all too quickly. He hears his breathing grow heavy and erratic. Pain washes over him and pumps into his half-emptied veins, as though trying to fill them again. He gurgles hoarsely.
The recognition that his life is over gives him surprising clarity: new, unspoiled, and spontaneous, his thoughts are brief flashes of insight exploding in his head like tiny suns. Today he’s himself, only inside out. Some days he is, and some days he has been, and tomorrow he will be no more. The precise language of pain tells him so.
The backyard light of his apartment building winks sharply off the broad steel blade of the kitchen knife. When it’s thrust into him again, now with greater force, he hears the crunching sound of a rib. He gasps as his stomach is punctured, then doubles over the shaft.
He hangs on the knife like an animal on a spit. Two pairs of eyes, wide open in fear, look at each other. He recognizes the second pair. He remembers the man and knows why he’s about to die. He sees the sweat bead on his murderer’s forehead, the broken blood vessel in his eye, the bulging artery in his neck. He himself burbles through his blood-filled mouth.
When the murderer releases the knife, he falls. He feels light, but falls heavily: not even at the end of his life can he defy gravity. The asphalt grasps him, and he watches his blood slowly pour out and trickle toward the drain like melted snow in the first spring sun.
A nearby train rattles down the tracks, momentarily breaking the silence in the backyard. The murderer takes his wallet and vanishes through the gate, but he won’t die alone. In the ground-floor apartment, at the window, stands a woman. There’s something about the way she’s observing the scene. Her eyes give her away. They stare unblinking: he deserves this.
The muscles in his neck give in, and his head thumps against the asphalt like a ball. She quickly draws the curtains as his eyes close. With her reproachful gaze as his final human interaction, he departs this life in a fog of stillness. Time stretches, tenses like a bow, releases, and sails through the air. The hourglass gets crushed, and the shards in the fine particles of sand reveal how time passed here—until it ceased.
1
PETER
East Berlin, May 1975
The lake had always been there, fenced in by a dense forest that, in some places, stretched all the way to the water. Of course it was an exaggeration to say “always,” since it had been sculpted from the landscape during the last ice age. Erosion had pulled at the terrain and carved the lake into its current form. The trees and tall reeds encircled it tightly to the bank, nearly concealing it from the world, but they had found it all the same. During the winter, the students at the international communist school Jugendhochschule Wilhelm Pieck had made tentative steps on the ice, but since the start of May, when the weather improved and the countryside regained its color, they came to swim.
A few girls on the shore shrieked shrilly when a glistening green frog hopped over their blanket. One in German, one in Finnish, one in Spanish, and a fourth in some African language that seemed to consist solely of vowels. The frog didn’t notice the many linguistic variants describing a fear of Hyla arborea, however, and just continued to search for a sun-heated lily pad.
Peter heard Florian beside him laughing at the startled girls. The strong sun reminded Peter of his mother, but not because he wanted to think of her. Maybe it was more the way her soft voice always made her dictum sound like a piano chord in his head: You mustn’t look at the sun. You’ll ruin your eyesight. The words were always uttered softly in a gentle but tired tone of voice, as if she didn’t believe them herself. They were dutiful—spoken the same way she’d heard them from her mother. The phrase was an heirloom passed from generation to generation, like a christening gown. It was the kind of sentence one carried through life, a classic childhood instruction, but as he considered it now, he could think of no one who’d ever been blinded by the sun. Helmut, one class ahead of him in school, was blind in one eye, but his blindness was the result of something he’d inherited at birth. Still, Peter wasn’t eager to tempt fate. So he’d learned not to look at the sun. Instead he tried to sense it, glancing above it, beside it, around it. He fashioned its outline in his mind without ever endangering his vision.
And that’s how he looked at her now, his gaze brushing innocently around her. No direct contact, no lingering that might betray him. He pretended to be watching the lake while observing her out of the corner of his eye, trying to capture shapes and details, slowly forming a complete image: her arms, shoulders, legs. Occasionally, his eyes disobeyed orders and looked directly at her; when they did, he punished them at once by turning to the other girls—who were in bathing suits that cut deep lines above their thighs.
Once again his eyes sought her out, darting quickly around the periphery of her body. She pushed off her sandals with her toes. She pulled the thin dress over her head, and her red curly hair followed through the opening in the neck. Her bikini was white like her freckled skin, which the sun had spared. She was slender, and her full breasts rested heavily in her bikini top.
She headed down to
the bank. Several of the others were already in the water. She shouted something to Ejner in their language. He waved. His hands, big as barges, were raw and uneven like his beard. Ejner Madsen was older than the others and worked at the harbor in the Danish town of Korsør. He and Peter talked frequently, and they’d developed a kind of friendly rapport.
She eased into the water, and the lake grew still. The sun reflected on the dark water, where the cirrocumulus clouds were mirrored and water lilies floated and mosquito larvae climbed to the surface each evening. A few scrawny branches wavered from the trees that leaned over the water, waiting for the current that never arrived.
“She’s from Denmark,” Florian said.
Peter nodded. He already knew that, and he knew that her name was Elisabeth.
Then the first raindrops pattered down sluggishly, shivering the leaves with a delicate lightness. All at once the swimmers turned into hooting runners, gathering their clothing and laughing and sliding along the forest path that oozed with the transparent rain. Rain poured from the sky, and a steady aroma rose from the forest floor. He ran behind Elisabeth. The water had flattened her hair to her head. The curls were shiny, the reddish hue darker. The summer dress she’d thrown back on had grown sheer in the rain; the light cotton now merged with her body and became part of her. Her shoulders were round and strong, her spine forming a sharp line down toward her rear, where her muscles tensed beneath the fabric with every step she took.
Pellets of water dripped from them when they reached the school. The girls, including Elisabeth, went to their rooms to change into clothes that didn’t cling to their bodies and reveal their figures. Peter watched her—the way her calves tightened and the gentle sway of her rear—as she disappeared up the stairwell. On the way to his room, he fantasized about stripping off the soaked summer dress that clung to her belly. Pulling the bikini top off to expose her breasts and the large, dull circles around her nipples. Pictured a droplet traveling down her breastbone, bypassing her belly button, and continuing down toward her pubic hair. He forced these thoughts away. To think of Elisabeth in this way was disrespectful.
The room was empty. His three roommates—Thomas, Otto, and Florian, all from different regions of the German Democratic Republic—weren’t around. Peter unbuttoned his blue polyester shirt. When the shirt was dry, it irritated his skin when he ran his fingers across the seams, but when the shirt was wet, it was heavy and harmless. He removed it. The stiff collar stood up straight on the back of the chair. He’d never grown used to his stiff and formal uniform shirt. After three years in the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment, he was generally accustomed to the feeling, but no other youth leagues wore uniforms. Their clothes were different. The synthetic fabric made him feel all wrong, and the uniform made noises; it rustled, and it was rigid and old-fashioned in comparison to the foreigners’ colorful shirts and pants, which did not seem to irritate their skin.
He lay down on his bed, and his eyelids shut out the afternoon. He recognized Florian’s footsteps, the soles’ precise clop against the floor. The bed above him creaked, and he opened his eyes. Florian cocked his head and peered at him curiously, attempting to appear like a question mark. It seemed like a contradiction, because his face almost always looked like an answer. Everything was carefully measured, the distance from his nose to his eyes, the slope of his cheeks, the width of his mouth. Even his dimples appeared to have been made with a compass. Everything about him was calculated with a precision and exactness—just as one folds a piece of paper in the middle and cuts it with scissors. That was Florian’s face.
“You’re in love with her.”
Peter already knew that, and he knew that her name was Elisabeth.
2
ANDREAS
Berlin, October 2006
His right shoe instantly absorbs water. He hears the rhythmic clicking of the turn signal, far away, like the second hand ticking around the face of a clock. The orange blinking light is reflected in the puddle of water that’s filled one of the cracks in the asphalt, both illuminating his field of vision and returning it to darkness with punctual frequency. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the scant light from the car; it glints in his eye each time the penetrating color strikes the puddle. He’s paused next to the open car door, his eyes fastened on the surface of the water, which is disturbed by the impact of the raindrops. He thinks of his father.
The hum of the idling car engine and the clicking turn signal blends with the drumming rain on a mailbox. Andreas listens to these sounds until the dark-skinned man behind the wheel clears his throat. Then he hands the taxi driver a euro bill and briefly studies the small altar in the front window above the instrument panel. A rosary dangles from the rearview mirror. He swings his backpack over his shoulder and turns to look at the white street sign. There’s something reassuring—almost cozy and pleasant—about the street names in this part of the city: Kopenhagener Strasse, Dänenstrasse, Bornholmerstrasse, Korsörerstrasse.
He zips up his jacket and starts walking. To his right is an empty playground. A tire swing wavers in the wind, and a jungle gym propped in the thick sand glistens in the rain. Down the street, on a gray building with narrow balconies, he finds the number he’s looking for. He walks through a graffiti-covered gate and enters a courtyard. He stops at the entrance and reads the name on the buzzer. He senses that someone is watching him, and in a first-floor apartment window, he spots an elderly woman. She pulls the curtain closed, and her shadow gradually recedes behind the pane.
He lets himself into the building with the key he’d gotten in the mail from attorneys Schultz and Donnerwitz. The walls of the stairwell are chinked and haven’t seen a paintbrush in decades. At the top he finds the nameplate on a tarnished door.
He enters the apartment and drops his backpack. The small entranceway has a marbled linoleum floor that creaks slightly underfoot, as if the glue has begun to unstick. He locates the light switch and is startled by the color of the wallpaper, with its brown-and-orange flowers vining the walls. He opens a window to remove the acrid stink that emanates from the empty beer bottles gathered in one corner of the kitchen. A lonely chair stands beside a square table near the window. When he sees it, Andreas realizes how little he actually knows about his father. He pulls the chair out and sits down. He stares out the window, trying to see what his father saw whenever he sat there, but the windows are thick with rain, and outside it’s pitch dark.
Berlin is a welcome diversion for Andreas, an escape, though such diversions require that one be on a path in the first place. He is the opposite. Andreas didn’t want his father to die, of course, but his death nevertheless came at an opportune time. He is frustrated by his thesis, and his thesis is frustrated by him. Officially, he has been working on it for four years, but he has now run out of excuses and ways to procrastinate. So every morning he sits, staring at the pulsating, empty computer screen. He’s a perpetual student who lacks motivation. The goal is far off in the distance, and he no longer wants to get there. The trip to Berlin is a welcome disruption from his daily life, which consists mostly of suppressing what his daily life ought to consist of, and this excuse could hardly be more believable.
He stands up and enters the small living room, then drapes his jacket over the back of a dining chair and watches the raindrops drip from it and onto the shag carpet, which is the same color as the turn signal in the taxi. He glances around the living room. It’s a time capsule. Not only has he traveled to Berlin, but he’s also traveled back to the 1970s.
Along one wall is a shelving unit made of a light-blond laminate. He picks a random book, Die Nacht kam zu spät by Paul Riemann-Müller, and riffles absently through it. There’s a scribbled dedication: Dear Peter. He puts it back and takes another, a German book about solitaire with several dog-eared pages. A picture frame captures his attention. Originally it was meant to look like gold, but now it’s tarnished and dull. His father stares at him from the yellowed photo: a friendly, young face. His
blond hair is combed to one side, and though he’s dressed in a shirt and tie, he doesn’t appear stylish. His father looks very different from the way Andreas imagined he would, but he immediately recognizes himself in the space between the eyes and mouth.
As he gazes at the photograph, he feels a piercing sadness. It grows, pushing all the way through him. He’s sad because his father is dead and because he never met him. When he was a child, his father was always in his thoughts. Andreas imagined that Peter could see him, as if he were a TV channel that his father could click on, but such thoughts had made him feel guilty. He had no need for a father: he had Thorkild. His mother, Elisabeth, had hardly ever mentioned Peter. Their family consisted of her, Thorkild, and Andreas, and Peter was an unknown entity whom no one ever spoke of or figured into the equation.
He and Thorkild don’t share the same DNA, Andreas knows, but they share so much else: his childhood, a life—his life—but he could never fully suppress thoughts of Peter. He has always felt a certain longing, been curious. These feelings were occasionally very pronounced, while at other times they were toned down by puberty or crushes he’d had on girls. There has always been an empty place in the family album, and now he finally has the opportunity to fill that gap. Even though his father will be buried in a few days, Andreas feels he owes it to both Peter and himself to learn more about the man he was forced to live without. He asks questions, hoping that the apartment will answer some of them. Who was Peter? Did he ever think of Andreas? And why would someone want to murder him?
He tabulates the few things he already knows about his biological father: fifty-four years old, born and raised in the GDR, name Peter Körber, dead. That’s it. His knowledge of the GDR is also limited. Since he was only thirteen in 1989, Germany’s reunification hadn’t made much of an impression on him, though what followed afterward did. The stories about Stasi—a security service that knew everything about every citizen and spared nothing to get what it wanted—and the comparisons to the Gestapo. Thorkild had explained it all to him, his voice tinged with irritation, as if the entire ideology had turned its back on him. Andreas simply hopes that Peter was never caught in Stasi’s claws, never subjected to their brutal interrogations, never sat alone and afraid in one of their terrible prisons.
The Wall Between Page 1