The Wall Between

by Jesper Bugge Kold

  The nightmare was not a dream; it was all too real. The tears were real, as were the laughter and the overjoyed faces, and yet it couldn’t be real. He would have to wake up soon; it had to be a dream. Maybe he would find Kerstin back at the hotel room, or even better: they would wake up together in their apartment back on Kopenhagener Strasse.

  Gripped by panic, Peter wanted only to get away from it all, so he started to walk toward home. Several people hugged him along the way. A man in denim with a bushy mustache made the peace sign right in Peter’s face; another waved a flag over Peter’s head. The center of the flag, where the GDR emblem had once been displayed, had been cut out.

  The growing hordes seemed impenetrable, but he fought his way through. The guards watched in resignation, their hands clasped behind their backs, lipstick smeared on their cheeks. Some wore flowers in their buttonholes. People laughed at Peter as they danced across the border crossing. Some shouted at him, saying that freedom was the other way. They tried tugging him along with them, but he clung to the barrier and resisted the mass of people. He felt like a swimmer fighting for his life. The waves crashed against him, ripped and tore at his clothes. His coat disappeared, and he lost one of his shoes, which was kicked away by hundreds of tromping feet. On tired, unsteady legs, he finally made it across the border.

  A guard scrutinized him. “You coming home already?”

  Peter continued on without replying. The entire city was out, and the euphoria was a communal shout that reverberated. “The Wall has fallen! The Wall has fallen!” Tears formed in his eyes as he let himself into his building as his neighbor Irene Krause disappeared behind her curtain. The celebrations carried on straight through to morning. As the sun rose, he knew that nothing would ever be the same.

  36

  STEFAN

  Berlin, October 1990

  Stefan didn’t understand the television that day. On every channel he heard talk of reunification, but it didn’t concern him. Every station featured smiling faces, as if they had just won an important soccer match. Though they spoke in German, what they were saying was incomprehensible to him, almost ramblingly euphoric. It irritated him that their foolish joy filled all of his channels, because Dempsey and Makepeace was on every Wednesday. That’s how he knew what day it was.

  He could hear his parents toasting in the living room. They’d asked him if he wanted to celebrate with them, but he didn’t know what they had to celebrate. They tried to explain something about a wall, but he didn’t understand and didn’t care. Maybe they had told him that he’d once been a mason, he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he’d once been something other than what he was now.

  Stefan watched TV all the time. He could no longer read, because his eyes had been ruined by the bright lights in his cell. He watched crime shows, lifestyle programs, documentary films, series—anything that could keep him from thinking. Sports calmed him, animal programs made him affectionate, cooking shows made him hungry, and porn gave him erections.

  He occasionally trudged around the apartment. He tried all the doorknobs, just to be sure that no doors were locked. Even the front door was open, and he began to go out. Often he went with his mother, but when she didn’t go with him, she would supply him with a note with their address and some money for a cab. On his strolls, he gradually relearned the neighborhood. He spent hours sitting on a bench and observing the children on the playground near the apartment block.

  Whenever his mother went shopping, she always forced Stefan to come along. She said that he would need to learn to take care of himself someday. So she taught him how to shop, prepare food, and wash clothes, and she taught him how to find his way around the city by himself. He enjoyed his walks around the city, because no one told him where to go. He walked on and on, as if he were searching for something—he didn’t know what. Maybe the person he’d once been? Though they’d tried, his parents hadn’t been able to conceal from him that he was not like others. They talked to him often about his childhood and his brother, Alexander, who now lived in Australia but never visited them; it seemed that he wanted to forget everything and everyone from his past. They talked about Nina, but he recalled nothing except for the cries of an infant and a woman with curly hair. “Yes, that’s her,” they said, but when he asked what happened to her, they fell silent.

  Stefan’s father died in 1996, and his mother followed two years later. A man from the authorities visited him. Stefan didn’t understand what he said, but they gave him money every month. He did what he’d learned: he shopped, made dinner, and washed clothes. One day, a letter arrived from the real estate company. Due to missed payments and repeatedly ignored reminders, his lease was being terminated. He packed his duffel and moved out, but he didn’t know where to go.

  37

  ANDREAS

  Frederikssund, April 2007

  They park at the fried chicken joint. It’s still completely dark when they walk out onto the bridge. They’re not the first ones there. A man raps his pipe on the guardrail, and it vibrates against the metal. Then he blows a solid puff of air into it, and it whistles a shrill note as if it were a wind instrument. Already he has two garfish in his bucket. Aerodynamic darts, with wide-open eyes and needle-sharp teeth glisten a blue-green.

  It’s almost seven o’clock, and the sun is on its way up over Frederikssund, sluggish and lazy. Many sport fishermen prefer to fish at a place called the Broken Teeth, the long headland where the remains of the old train trestle are planted in the bottom of the fjord. The water is deep there, and during the late summer months, they pull in sea trout as they’re swimming into their spawning areas. Andreas and Thorkild prefer Crown Prince Frederick’s Bridge. He doesn’t recall why, but it’s a tradition. Year after year they stand on the bridge on a Sunday in April and watch garfish shoot up the fjord in enormous schools, looking like organic torpedoes. Late in the afternoon, when their bucket is full, they go home to Vanløse. In the evening, Thorkild pan fries the fish and prepares a thick parsley sauce. He brings a bottle of sauvignon blanc up from the basement, or a Riesling, and if Elisabeth doesn’t have a meeting, she’ll eat with them. Afterward, Andreas will ride his bicycle back to the city, feeling like he’s still a child.

  Thorkild hasn’t seen Andreas since he returned home from Berlin a few weeks ago. He dozed in the car while Thorkild hummed softly along with Joni Mitchell’s album, Blue. Out on the bridge, they prepare their carbon fiber poles. Thorkild finds a few lures in his tackle box, which smells of bait, saltwater, and Nescafé. The old Jensen Tobis lures are worn down from all the times they’ve been dragged through saltwater, but they still work.

  The garfish’s long mouth makes it nearly impossible to hook, so Thorkild binds a three-inch piece of fishing twine between the lure and the hook. Every year, he explains to Andreas that he devised this technique when he’d learned to fish with his grandfather. Three inches is the most humane length of hook for the fish, he says every time he hands Andreas a lure.

  They fasten the lures to the line and cast. The only thing they hear is the soft click of their reels spinning like newly oiled racing bikes. Otherwise the morning is quiet. The sun glistens on the water, and the stillness is shattered by a school of garfish swimming close to the surface. The fish pass by an early-rising pleasure boater. His boat, a rundown carbon fiber model with a tarnished blue great sail, glides slowly toward the bridge. Two blinking red lights indicate that the bridge will open for through-sailing from the north. Rattling heavily, the two halves of the road begin to rise in the air, breaking the silence for a moment.

  A light breeze brushes Andreas’s face, and he remembers to enjoy it, the fresh air that softly waves his worries away, like a docking station filling him up. He sucks it in, all the way down into his lungs, then pushes it out again. The morning breeze is gentle, like the bristles of a soft broom or a piece of fabric.

  Thorkild is silent. He always is on such mornings. Not until the first fish is pulled from the water does he begin to talk.<
br />
  Andreas’s pole vibrates in his hand. The garfish is toying with him, tugging at the lure with its mouth. He reels in a little. A few more tiny nips. He’s the old man in Hemingway’s novella, he’s Santiago, and his streak of eighty-four days without a fish on his hook seems to be coming to an end. The pole vibrates again. The boy, Manolin, mustn’t sail with him any longer, and all that remains is the lonely struggle between a man and a fish. He drags the lure through the water—quickly but not too quickly—so that it planes the surface. He pauses. Then he spins the reel once more and pauses again. Spins. Then he jerks on the line and begins to haul the fish in. As it leaps from the water, he can tell that it’s hooked perfectly; it struggles, writhes, and tries to break free. Andreas yanks it out of the water, and Thorkild hauls it over the guardrail with his net.

  When the garfish is in the bucket, Thorkild nods, acknowledging its size. He clears his throat, “So, how was Berlin?”

  Andreas thinks of his mother. She’d asked what Andreas had learned about his father, but by her tone he could tell that she didn’t really want to know. Maybe it was just him, but he thought he heard sarcasm in her voice. Lagging behind the question was another sentence waiting to emerge. Once Andreas muttered some vague reply, she was ready with, “What did I tell you?”

  Something made him want to shield Peter from her. So he said nothing about Stasi, nothing about the interrogation and Nina Lachner’s death or Bea’s forced adoption. Once upon a time, he would have wanted nothing more in the world than to talk about Peter with her, but not anymore. Not after what he’d learned about him.

  Sometimes he’s not even sure just what he knows. Ever since Bea told him that Peter worked for Stasi, he’s questioned everything, but Peter had been more than just a Stasi man. In his relationships with Veronika and Bea and in the letter to Kerstin, Andreas had met a completely different person, a man who’d been considered good, even loving. It’s as if countless identities resided within Peter: evil, ambitious, loving, cynical, good, heartless, lovable. Little by little he begins to recognize himself in his father. Andreas can’t accept all of Peter’s actions, but he tries to accept the fact that his own father was as much a composite as he himself is. So he feels a shift inside him, almost a physical change. It occurs to him that not only has he been trying to find his father, he’s also been trying to find himself.

  But for some reason, Andreas decides to confide in Thorkild. Standing on the bridge, he tells him the entire story of Peter, Bea, and Veronika.

  38

  STEFAN

  Berlin, October 2006

  Though the heel of his hand was bleeding, he felt no pain. It was an open, oblong slice from a broken bottle. Stefan found a napkin smeared with dressing and wiped his hand with its cleanest corner. Now he had a fresh wound to go along with all the encrusted scabs that covered his hands. Using his other hand, he continued digging for his dinner in the garbage bin, though more carefully this time. Someone had tossed out a half-eaten döner kebab. It looked fine except for some unidentifiable black flakes and a single shard from the glass bottle, easily removable.

  He didn’t have a regular place to sleep. Usually he found a back alley, but he had to be careful about urine streams. If he was lucky, he found a dry piece of cardboard to sleep on. Sometimes he slept in parks, in abandoned buildings, or on the hot-air vents—if they weren’t already occupied. Some people lived on them and didn’t give them up without a fight. He often recalled his time in the factory. The best time of his life. He smiled at the thought—at the fact that he could remember, which was new to him, but he still remembered nothing from before his time in prison. His parents had shown him old photographs and told him about his life, but it was as though they were speaking about someone else. He did remember the cell, the interrogations, Emil Brank, and more and more about his life after prison.

  After he was forced out of the apartment, he’d traversed every inch of the city, every sidewalk, every section of asphalt, and then one day he’d found himself in front of the train station. Suddenly he’d recognized something, though he wasn’t sure what it was that had caught his attention. His legs had taken him up the stairs, onto the platform, and onto the train. He’d gotten off at another station and then walked on. Only his feet knew where to go. Then he stopped and simply looked around.

  They poked the sky like two naked trees, but they were taller. At least two hundred feet, maybe three hundred. Slender columns that stretched up into the clouds, spitting smoke into the air. He suddenly recalled the approving way he and his colleagues had looked at them as they crossed Langerhans Canal in their overalls on their way to work. Yes, this was where he’d worked.

  What was left of his porous memory had brought him there. As he gazed at the abandoned factory through the wire fence, he recalled the large production facilities that echoed when you sang, the ovens that belched smoke into the chimneys, the administration buildings where Bernd Müller had once hung calendars with photos of scantily clad women, and the cafeteria where he’d once attended someone’s wedding. He saw the enormous, cylinder-shaped cisterns with the steel ladders that had once held sulfuric acid. They weren’t allowed to fill the cisterns completely, because the acid expanded as the temperature rose in the tanks. He pictured himself in rubber boots, gloves, and safety goggles, and he remembered the mild prick he felt on his skin at the end of the working day. They made animal feed and fertilizer, and he remembered the distinct smell of phosphates.

  He walked along the fence. Someone had cut a hole in one spot. He squeezed through the hole and entered the vast expanse of the plant. The buildings were now useless behemoths, corpses of concrete dinosaurs. Everything had been abandoned. The production halls were hollow, resoundingly empty; all the windows were smashed, and the floor was littered with empty plastic jugs and pill bottles with skull and crossbones symbols on their disintegrating labels. A few birds fluttered around the ceiling, flying in and out of the gaping windows. The offices were a mess of papers, handwritten notes, broken furniture, and cat excrement. Poisonous green puddles fizzed, and weeds had begun pushing up through the rust-red soil. A sharp chemical smell hung in all the rooms and stung his lungs. There was graffiti on the walls, large cursive lettering that he couldn’t read and a riot of colorful drawings of faces like those in comic books.

  He looked around for a place to sleep and for any curtains that he could use as blankets. A skinny cat with large, curious eyes followed him. He named it Petra, not knowing why; it just seemed to fit the gray-striped kitty. When he lay down on his makeshift bed, he tried filling in the blank spaces in his memory but could only summon images of himself in the factory. Through the tall windows, he saw the night sky full of stars, like seeds blown from a hand. There was hardly room for all of them. Some of the stars fell, a sparkling tail of light trailing behind them. Each night he fell asleep to the creaking sound of rust and decay, with warm little Petra in his arms.

  During the day, he went downtown to forage through the trash bins. He jumped off the train whenever he spotted a train conductor’s uniform.

  One morning he was woken up with a kick. He sat up, confused, drowsy. A guard was staring at him and kicked his legs again. Stefan winced, and the cat jumped off.

  “You can’t sleep here. Get out.”

  Another guard appeared. “Come on, Jan. I think he got the message.”

  “I want to kick him to pieces, goddamn it. Look how scared he is.”

  “Come on.”

  Stefan stared at him. The voice seemed familiar, and he felt as though he was about to remember the face. That hadn’t happened before. They dragged him to the fence. He crawled through the hole and scrutinized the two men, who both seemed to puff themselves up in their navy-blue uniforms. He was more and more certain that he’d seen one of them before.

  “Get lost!” they yelled.

  39

  ANDREAS

  Vanløse, April 2007

  As they walk up the flagstone path, Andreas spots
his mother through the kitchen window. She sets down the potato peeler when they enter the house, dries her hands on her apron, and kisses Andreas on both cheeks. Thorkild proudly holds up the bucket with their catch, so she can see the fish.

  “Would you mind preparing them on the patio? Otherwise the kitchen will smell of fish.”

  She puts the pot filled with potatoes on the stove and snaps off the radio. Andreas follows her into the living room. She pours wine for them and hands him a glass. They sit on opposite ends of the sofa.

  “It’s lovely to see you, dear,” she says as she sips her white wine. “I love this tradition. It’s just like when you were a boy. Do you remember when you and Thorkild came home after the car had hit one hundred thousand miles? Do you remember how excited you were?”

  He nods and instantly feels himself getting defensive. He has no energy for talk. He decides it’s time to ask some questions.

  “Why are you pretending that I never went to Berlin?”

  “I’m not.” She smiles, unperturbed.

  “Why didn’t ever tell me anything about Peter?” As he speaks, he hears an echo of all the times he has asked this question.

  He sees her hesitate. In a minute she’ll begin her classic evasive maneuver: pour more wine and change topics. Through the patio doors, they see Thorkild cleaning the fish, slicing them from the anus to the ventral fins. When he’s removed the entrails, he cuts off the heads and tails and tosses those parts back in the bucket.