The Wall Between

by Jesper Bugge Kold

  He thought of Elisabeth often. A scent, a sound, or a word could bring her to mind. Until recently, his daydreams of her had been untroubled. Then he began seeing another woman, and his dreams were mixed with guilt—and now he held tangible evidence that Elisabeth still thought of him.

  Peter had met Martina at a dance club that served inch-thick bockwurst and meatball sandwiches while bands enticed men and women out onto the herringbone parquet floor with their music. People came from all over the city, even from the other side of the Wall: workers, soldiers, civil servants, and cheating spouses afraid of being discovered and concealing themselves in the corners, lipstick on their cheeks.

  Peter went there with Florian. Florian wanted to dance and Peter watched the girls dance and kept an eye on his friend’s beer. He and Martina both seemed out of place among the dancing couples, and that established a clear connection between them across the room. They’d seen one another on his first visit, and they’d been a couple ever since. That was three months ago.

  She lived in Kopenhagener Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg, taught at the Yuri Gagarin Polytechnic School, and was a member of the Democratic Women’s League of Germany, and her parents read Neues Deutschland, the party’s official newspaper, so frequently that their hands were black with ink. In short, Peter had done a thorough background check on her and determined that she and her family were clean.

  Peter went into the living room. He’d been overjoyed to receive the letter, but now he was suddenly afraid. He sat at the dining table with the envelope in his hand, studying it. Though she’d written his name and address with a sure hand, his own shook. Why would she write to him unless it was to deliver good news? Why take the trouble unless she wanted to share something with him? Maybe she’ll be coming to the GDR soon? What would he do with Martina if Elisabeth came?

  He’d knocked three times under the table, at first in anticipation, but now he did it again, this time in fear, for good luck or, at the very least, to ward off any bad news. It was a ritual he’d inherited from his paternal grandmother, though she had always added an extra knock, a fourth and harder knock, as if that last one was meant to go beyond a mere invocation. She’d collected a surplus of knocks, thousands—a kind of motoric tic for use in emergencies. She had married a good man and had four children who were still alive, and she herself had survived two wars. Her tic had worked right up until the day the truck came roaring along, and all the little knocks had merged into one giant crash.

  He tore open the envelope, unfolded a single sheet of paper, and began to read.

  After he’d read the letter to the end, it slipped from his hand. He stared at it, dumbstruck. He tried to make sense of it, but struggled to comprehend the consequences. A son? His son? Peter counted on his trembling fingers. The boy must be five months old now. That’s how long he’d been a father, and he was only discovering it now. It was her duty to tell him, she wrote. She knew he would never be allowed to leave the GDR, that he’d never be able to see Andreas. Why tell him, then? And why did it upset him? After all, he hadn’t wanted a child.

  9

  ANDREAS

  Berlin, October 2006

  Andreas was born at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen. When Elisabeth had come home from studying in Germany, her belly had started to expand. She never even considered having an abortion. She wanted the child. No one understood the decision, but she wasn’t going to change her mind. The young, aggressive left-wing activist was going to be a single mother. Was she rebelling against her parents or protesting mainstream society? And why wouldn’t she say who the father was?

  During a political protest, Elisabeth—in the late stage of her pregnancy—chained herself to the fence at the newly opened Barsebäck Nuclear Plant, and it was there she met Thorkild. They fell in love as the Swedish police attempted for several hours to locate bolt cutters to clip the chains. Thorkild was the union rep at the Burmeister & Wain shipyard and, like Elisabeth, active in Denmark’s Communist Party and the popular movement against the European Economic Community, and both rejected the Soviet-critical Maoists in the Communist Workers Party.

  Thorkild wanted complete honesty in their relationship, so he convinced Elisabeth to write Peter a letter informing him about his son. At first she’d refused, but Thorkild was persistent. He didn’t want to begin yet another marriage with untruths and nondisclosures. On the day Elisabeth mailed the letter at the post office on Jernbane Avenue, he proposed to her. They were married in January 1977, when Andreas had yet to turn one. Elisabeth had just turned twenty-three, and Thorkild was thirty-two.

  They bought a house in Vanløse and told their friends they were only renting it. In their social circle, where no one believed in the right of ownership, one wasn’t supposed to own a house. Publicly, then, Elisabeth and Thorkild had rented the villa for twenty-nine years, but the equity told quite a different story from the one their former party comrades knew.

  Elisabeth’s sister Irene had been a nun, a servant of God who believed in something larger than herself. She’d placed her life in the hands of the divine, while Elisabeth had placed hers in the hands of a revolution that never materialized. Elisabeth had once been zealous in her convictions, believing she would go to her grave for them, but that was no longer the case. Her convictions were harmless now; they were streamlined, adapted to voters and not the other way around, and she was a member of the city council as a social democrat. Elisabeth still considered herself a leftist. Her communist background was a repressed memory, concealed behind a thirty-year mortgage, retirement savings, and interest deductions.

  Thorkild had also softened with age, but given the right cue, he could still go on for hours about the solidarity at Burmeister & Wain where the workers were organized. Their crowning achievement was—even if it was many years ago—the founding in 1865 of The Workers’ Building Society, which would later build the workers’ district known as Humleby in Copenhagen. When he told such stories, the old fire returned to his eyes, and he read good-night stories every night to Andreas in the same spirit. Thorkild had not read childish fairy tales to his son in the soft intonation of a doting father, but rather, with the tone of a union rep, his voice thick with indignation, as he impressed the family’s convictions upon the child.

  There was something teddy bear–like about Thorkild, though he wasn’t fat or hairy. Everyone liked him. He always wore Wrangler blue jeans, a comb poking up from his pocket, fine-toothed on one end and thick-toothed on the other. He once tried to grow a beard, and they’d laughed at him until he began to laugh himself. His laughter came from deep within his belly. Thorkild loved Elisabeth, and she loved him, and together they were a perfect match.

  Thorkild’s life had stalled, but not in a negative way. He was fine with the fact that Elisabeth was the one with a career who went to political meetings night after night. Meanwhile, he took care of Andreas.

  When Andreas was a boy, Thorkild was much more of a father to him than any of the other fathers were to the other kids in his class. It was almost like an act of defiance: no one could say he was not Andreas’s father. Andreas and Niels were the only boys in the class who didn’t know their biological fathers. Niels’s father had died on an oil rig in the North Sea when Niels was just a bump pushing his mother’s belly button out. Niels got Svend instead. It was better to avoid some fathers, and Svend was one of those.

  Elisabeth hadn’t actually wanted Andreas to know that Thorkild wasn’t his biological father, but Thorkild had insisted: the boy needed to know, and you got farther in life when you were honest. When Andreas was a few years old, they told him the truth. Andreas continued to call Thorkild his father. Thorkild had never asked him to, but it seemed natural, because that’s how Andreas viewed him. Thorkild had always been there for him and never let him down.

  Thorkild’s honesty backfired on occasion. During his first few years of school, the other kids called Andreas “German Pig” and “German Boy” or other long-forgotten nicknames from the postwar ye
ars that were suddenly popular again once Thorkild told everyone about Andreas’s origins at one of the class’s first parent meetings.

  Andreas looks at his watch. For a moment he considers calling Thorkild. A sudden loneliness gives him the urge to talk with his stepfather. It’s Wednesday, so Thorkild is at the Open University. Elisabeth knows that Andreas is in Berlin, and she knows why. Still, she was strangely silent when he told her of Peter’s death. Thorkild was the one who smoothed things over. “She doesn’t want to stir up the past,” he told Andreas. For Andreas, Peter has never been part of the past, and now, even though he’s dead, he has suddenly become the present.

  Near the river Spree—with its canal tourist boats, it looks like just about any big city destination—is the Charité hospital. Its buildings are scattered across a large area, except for a colossus that towers unattractively above the city. The name is misleading. Not the meaning so much, but the fact that they chose a French word for a hospital in a city where everything else has a German name. An old king was enchanted by the neighboring country’s culture and language, and so the hospital is named for the French word for charity.

  Once inside he immediately feels the word hospital resting on his diaphragm, reminding him of when he was a child and how the word police automatically made him feel guilty, even though he hadn’t done anything to be guilty about, but the word police was linked with guilt, just like the word hospital was linked with pain.

  Berlin’s police had contacted him the day before and told him they’d put more people on the case. Andreas had trouble gauging whether this was true or simply something the police said to reassure Peter’s relatives that they were doing their jobs properly.

  He reports to the reception desk. The woman behind the counter immediately hands him a form through the bisected window. When he attempts to explain what he’s there for, it’s as if she doesn’t want to understand him. Swiftly and aggressively, she yanks back the form and ignores him for a few moments. Then she asks him to have a seat. When he turns toward the waiting room, she sighs.

  He sits down. He has plenty of patience; he knows full well that doctors in hospitals are busy. He grabs a magazine off the table. He flips through the pages, then puts it back. He wishes that Bea was here with him, but she’s at a university lecture.

  He watches the receptionist, how she greets all the patients with a smile. Perhaps it’s because he’s not here for an examination but something else—something she doesn’t understand—she seems to think he doesn’t deserve a smile, but it doesn’t matter; it’s only a dutiful smile. When she catches him looking at her, she turns away immediately. He’s been waiting for three hours. His grumbling belly chases his patience away. Drumming his fingers on the armrest, he considers leaving.

  Wooden clogs clap against the floor. Finally. She points him out to the doctor, as if she has found him guilty of something. There’s something reproachful about the receptionist’s narrow wrist poking out from her smock. He pictures her biking home later, frustrated by her day. She’ll shout at a driver, snarl at a pedestrian, and scold a husband who has forgotten to buy cat food. In the evening she’ll lie in bed, tossing and turning, unable to sleep, because she’ll still be irritated at Andreas.

  The doctor approaches him. He pulls Andreas aside so that the other patients can’t hear their conversation. He lowers his glasses from the top of his head as if donning his professional countenance.

  “My name is Volker Dietmaier. I was the one who received your father.”

  Andreas nods. He hears the gravity in the doctor’s voice, and all at once his words become momentous. The man standing before him was the last person to see his father alive.

  “Was he dead upon arrival? Here, I mean.” His own voice sounds hesitant and weak. He doesn’t want to cry, but the heavy atmosphere of the hospital presses down on him. Swallowing loudly, he keeps his tears at bay by thinking of Bea.

  “Yes. He died quickly.” The doctor scrutinizes Andreas, as if considering how much to tell him. “If you’d like to know whether or not he suffered, then the answer is no. He died almost instantly.”

  Andreas latches onto the word almost. How much pain is contained in almost? The doctor has contradicted himself, because either Peter died instantly or he didn’t, but Andreas remains quiet out of respect.

  He looks at the doctor, who speaks with the authority of his profession. “Maybe your father had enemies. Perhaps someone held a grudge.”

  This last statement sounds like a question, but Volker Dietmaier backtracks. “On the other hand . . . it didn’t look like revenge.”

  “What do you mean?” Andreas asks.

  The doctor clears his throat. “If someone had wanted revenge, he probably would have been stabbed many more times than the two wounds that killed him. Deaths motivated by revenge are typically more violent.”

  Outside the hospital, Andreas gets a call on his cell phone.

  “We’ve arrested the culprit, a homeless man. There was still blood on the sleeve of his coat.” The policeman pauses as if to build suspense. When Andreas says nothing, he goes on. “He knew your father’s name. He said it himself.” Then he makes a sound that’s impossible to misunderstand: it is beneath him to catch this kind of amateur. He had looked forward to solving a case involving an autopsy and DNA analysis, but instead he’d been pulled into this trivial matter.

  “The motive is simple: robbery. Your father was at the wrong place at the wrong time and had a wallet in his back pocket.”

  The line goes silent. The policeman’s cliché rings in Andreas’s ears. What’s he supposed to say? Is he supposed to praise the work of the police? Is he happy? Relieved? He doesn’t know. He simply doesn’t know how to react. The man breathes loudly into the telephone, as if he’d just now run down the homeless man and is trying to catch his breath.

  “He had your father’s wallet on him. Would you like to come to the station for it, or should I send it to you?”

  After the call, he starts toward home, feeling dejected. He got nothing out of the conversation with the doctor, but what had he expected? That Volker Dietmaier had heard Peter’s final words? Andreas can’t allow himself to be disappointed, and yet he feels it welling up in him. How could a doctor who had treated his dying father have helped? The case is closed. He’d imagined that it would take weeks—maybe months or years, an exhausting length of time—to track down the culprit, but now it’s over. The murderer has been apprehended. He wants to direct his anger at the man who killed his father. Why take another’s life? Before sticking the knife in his father, he’d made a decision, however incomprehensible it might seem. If the murderer wasn’t a random person, then it was someone who intended to kill his father. Andreas feels overwhelmed at the thought. Where does he go from here? Meeting the doctor has only made him sadder, and the swift resolution of the case only confuses him further.

  Andreas has been at Peter’s apartment for an hour when Bea arrives. When he opens the door, he sees that she’s carrying a shiny black crash helmet under her arm. Every now and then, she borrows her friend’s motorcycle, she explains. Andreas pictures the boyfriend. Tall and muscular, maybe an upgraded rockabilly look—though without overdoing it—his slicked-back hair shining black like the enamel on the motorcycle’s gas tank, his tattoos spreading across his muscular forearms. Not showing them off, but as if they’ve always been there. He makes Bea laugh, and she’s proud of him. One day Andreas will meet him, but even now he knows he doesn’t want to.

  In the entranceway, he tells her about his conversation with the policeman.

  “Murdered by some insignificant vagrant.” Bea snorts. “He chose the wrong victim. Peter drank all his money.”

  “Did he drink a lot?” Andreas asks hesitantly, not certain he wants to know the answer or that he wants to reveal to Bea that the murderer knew his father.

  “Big time,” she says in English, which sounds comical emerging from her mouth.

  Something about this informa
tion makes him sad. It underscores the loneliness he’s sensed here in his father’s apartment, and it explains the many empty bottles on the kitchen floor. He imagines his father: gross, slovenly, and reeking of piss like the winos he rides past every day who squat in the little plaza behind Nørrebro Station in Copenhagen. How they sit, sprawl, or lie on or behind the benches—their world is colored green, because their misty-eyed stares see it through the beer bottles they’re always drinking. Maybe Peter was also like that, just in another plaza in another city? It’s depressing to think that his father might have hit rock bottom at the end of his life.

  “Can I make some coffee?” Bea asks.

  He’d like to say yes, but doesn’t feel that the decision is his. The apartment is as much hers as it is his. He nods, and they go into the kitchen. She looks for the coffee, and he points at the can on the top cupboard. She hasn’t been here in a long time, she says apologetically, and he hears hint of guilt in her voice.

  The coffee machine whirs as the final drops fall into the pot, what appears to be sludge. She hands him a full cup, and they return to the living room.

  “It probably tastes awful. Do you use milk?”

  He nods.

  She returns to the kitchen and comes back with a carton. The coffee tastes horrible, and they agree that the coffee machine belongs in a time capsule. They drink it anyway.

  “Was Peter ever married?” Andreas asks.

  “Not married in the traditional sense,” Bea says, then tells him about Martina and Kerstin. This was once Martina’s apartment, she explains. She points at the conch on the shelf. “And that’s all he had left of Kerstin. She’s probably suppressing her past in Freiburg, Stuttgart, or Bremen—somewhere in the West. All I know is that she abandoned him when the Wall fell. I think it broke his heart.”