The Wall Between

by Jesper Bugge Kold

  Elisabeth fills their glasses, though they’ve yet to empty them.

  “Andreas,” she says, her voice soft. She pauses. “You probably discovered something in Berlin, something I ought to have told you about years ago.” She sips her wine and shifts apprehensively in her chair.

  “I had this friend, Ejner Madsen. We talked pretty regularly until he moved to East Germany. He worked for Peter and confided in me that Peter worked for Stasi. Peter was the Stasi.”

  “I know.” Andreas looks at her earnestly, surprised that she’d known all along. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “To protect you, but maybe that was wrong of me. I just wanted to spare you.” Elisabeth bites her lip. “It wasn’t easy for me, you know.” She sighs. “I really believed in communism, but when I learned what Stasi was doing—and that Peter was part of it—suddenly I was no longer proud of it. After the Wall fell and all the skeletons came out of the closet, all my friends back here were quick to distance themselves from Stasi. I just tried to forget about Peter, and I didn’t see any reason that you should know about him.”

  Andreas regards his wine glass pensively as she speaks. If he’d known all that before his trip to Berlin, Bea might still be alive. He might never have felt compelled to learn more about Peter—he would never have gone to see Mrs. Majenka, would never have learned the truth. What right had he to interfere with her life?

  Elisabeth looks at him as though waiting for an indication that he’ll forgive her. He nods slowly, but only to make her turn away from him. They sit in silence for what seems like an eternity. Finally Thorkild enters with the grilled garfish on a plate. “You haven’t drunk all the wine, have you?”

  “I have to go.” Andreas gets up quickly. He doesn’t want to leave, but he doesn’t want to stay, either.

  Thorkild looks at him, puzzled. His raises his eyebrows and turns to Elisabeth. She shakes her head, her expression resigned.

  “Well, more fish for me then,” Thorkild says, trying to cover up his disappointment by sounding jovial.

  As Andreas bicycles back to the city, he considers how little Elisabeth has told him about Peter. Now he knows why she was so taciturn. His instinct is to be angry and let her have it, but he forgives her. All at once her reluctance to talk about Peter during his childhood makes sense: she didn’t withhold information out of malice but to shield him. Nonetheless, he had to get out of there. He just couldn’t sit there, thinking about Bea and pretending nothing had happened.

  Some memories are good for you, while others grow distorted with time. Andreas has made it a habit of clinging to the latter. Throughout his life he has viewed himself as a victim because he didn’t have a father. All this time he’s been looking for excuses for his own failures. He has always blamed others, never himself.

  It’s as though he awakens right there on the bike path on Hillerødgade. He must act; if he doesn’t, he’ll be stuck forever. Either he must become an active participant in life, or he’ll wind up a hermit living in some forest with a limping dog. He’s got to get on with his life, put an end to all those years of hibernation, face reality. Face himself.

  He realizes that in putting his memories of his father to rest, he’s buried his longing for him as well. It’s as though he’s suddenly free. It’s as though a chain has been removed from his ankle. He feels lighter, and everything that has held him back is now propelling him forward. He’ll have to start over, but where to begin?

  His apartment on Frederikssundsvej is like new, as though he’s never been there. He’s reinvigorated, brand-new. He punches a number on his cell phone.

  “Hi, Lisa. It’s me, Andreas.”

  40

  PETER

  Berlin, October 2006

  Peter looked at the others around the table. In a way, their faces were similar, all furrowed by loss, despondency, and disillusion. They weren’t all from East Germany, but their collision with the city had marked them all; their souls were battered by the many beatings the city had doled out. Now their hopes could be found at the bottom of every bottle of beer they drank. The same men, another afternoon. The casualties of reunification. The unemployment that plagued West Germany, which they’d once mocked, had now become their own. A common “good” for half the people. Only a single industry seemed unaffected by the crisis that had befallen East Berlin: the pubs.

  Peter and one other man were the only ones with jobs. Peter worked for Sonnenberger Security, a security firm that patrolled the city’s malls, factories, and warehouses. Most of the employees were former colleagues. Jan Grebe and Peter were partners. It was their job to keep shopping centers orderly and to make sure that thieves, teens, and other unruly elements didn’t disturb the customers, who’d come to send their Deutschmarks into circulation. Goods practically fell into shopping carts, and the security company now defended everything that he’d despised and fought against.

  And that wasn’t even the biggest problem. Now his company was being pushed out by other companies—tough Turks, broad-shouldered Poles, and Russians with facial tattoos who looked like members of a death cult. Sonnenberger had lost interest in his firm after his wife died in 1995, and he didn’t have the energy to fight the new competition. Little by little, they were forced out of the larger shopping centers and had to be content with factories, warehouses, and strip malls on the outskirts of the city where the local drunks held court on benches, counting their coins for another beer.

  Peter had begun to resemble those drunks. When he removed his uniform each night, he felt old. Not old in the sense that his bones creaked and his joints hurt, but old inside, in his head. All he wanted was another beer, and that’s what he got every day in this pub. He was only fifty-four, but he had no energy left for anything. What was there to muster energy for? How was he supposed to come to terms with the fact that his future was behind him? Did he have any hope left? The answer was simple and even more depressing than the question: no. Because no one even noticed him anymore. He meant nothing to anyone who meant something to him. He didn’t exist.

  Martina had left him, Kerstin had left him, and his country had crumbled around him. It had been a long time since he’d had any kind of influence, and loss of control made him feel empty. Once when he was very young, he had gotten drunk and the lightness of the intoxication was, briefly, uplifting. His sense of giddiness almost unreal, but then he’d vomited, which had been disgusting, and his self-recriminations the next day were even harsher. Since then, he’d never wanted to lose control of himself, his thoughts, or his body, but that loss of control was a daily goal now—a relief that made his life’s failures bearable.

  If he told anyone about what he used to do for a living, they sneered or spat at him, so he kept it to himself.

  He’d believed in the state, but it no longer believed in him, and he was just someone people pissed on, someone who could point you in the direction of the nearest McDonald’s, and when it was time for last call at the pub, he was more alone than alone, more lonely than lonely. No man should ever have to feel that sense of isolation, and certainly not a man of his caliber. Behind the mirror in his bathroom, where he kept the postcards for Bea, he also kept a gun, a nine-millimeter Makarov. It was a way out, and it was no longer a strange idea to him. Wolfgang’s suicide had been an embarrassment to the family, and Peter didn’t want to end up that way. That fact—coupled with his own cowardice—was what kept him alive.

  He still carried inside the pain of Kerstin leaving him, and where was she? He tried to find comfort in the possibility that her heart had also been broken, though he wasn’t entirely successful. Her beloved Patsy Cline had died in a plane crash in 1963. He always felt a certain sense of joy when thinking about that: Kerstin’s idol had been dead for over twenty-five years when Peter and Kerstin met, and she hadn’t known, but it was a pathetic revenge.

  “Understandable,” Tauber had said in response to Peter’s return from West Berlin, but Kerstin Hopp was branded a traitor just before there
was no longer a GDR to betray. Tauber blathered about how they had to make the most of the new situation, as though he completely failed to understand that everything would change, that everything before the Wall had come down was a beginning, and everything after was a conclusion.

  The years had passed, and he didn’t quite understand how. Perhaps life merely consisted of a set of points, moments that one could recall, and the rest, all the rest, was insignificant, and what did he remember? Only the good remained. How was he so able to distort his memories? He’d remember something one way even though he knew it hadn’t happened that way, but that was how he wanted to remember it. The more he told it, or the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like the truth. His truth.

  His son lived in Denmark, his own flesh and blood. Peter wondered what he was like, had always wanted to meet him, and it would be so easy. A train ticket to Denmark, but where others saw the Wall’s collapse as an opportunity, Peter saw the opposite. Anyway, what did he have to offer his son, who would probably be ashamed of what his own father had done?

  The best thing he could do was to stay away and never contact Andreas, because a wall still existed between them, or rather, a chasm, and there was no reason to attempt to scale it. In his mind, he’d written to his son often, but Andreas had never received the postcards because they’d been addressed to Beatrice. Everything he had written to her—including his parting words—I love you, Dad—he’d written for Andreas.

  Of course he loved Beatrice too, but she knew that. He didn’t have to write it to her. His one regret was that he’d deceived her with the lie about Wolfgang. He no longer recalled why Veronika had concocted the story of him fleeing. She’d had no reason to do so. Yet they’d maintained the story, and it eventually became the truth: Wolfgang had fled to the West, and the postcards Peter sent made the story credible. That had been his idea, and he’d enjoyed writing them, but Peter and Beatrice hardly spoke these days. Once she’d grown up, she drifted away. To love her wasn’t the same thing as to understand her. She wasn’t a child of the GDR like he was. She had been able to put the past behind her. He couldn’t.

  GDR was like an organ that had failed and now, following a transplant, the body had rejected the new organ. The West Germans were arrogant and condescending, because they were paying for everything. They called them eastwhiners, but they weren’t the ones forced to rummage in trashcans for food, and when a guy from Cologne or Munich spoke of his earliest memories, he called them simply childhood memories, but if he was from Leipzig or Dresden, it was contemptuously dismissed as eastalgia. Some East Germans were ashamed, some evolved, and many became turncoats. They edited their past, revising their personal history to suit the times. Those who had once been party men now claimed they’d fought state suppression of the people. That’s what they called it. Some put on their Sunday best and got good jobs somewhere with these sketchy memories, while others, like the men gathered around this table, put up with jobs not even Turkish immigrants wanted.

  The six men sat shoulder to shoulder in the cramped wooden booth. The frosted glass windows with their lace curtains allowed them to forget that it was still daytime, and the beer helped them to forget all else. Hartmut drained his bottle. Peter could tell by his darting eyes that he was about to let out his daily gripe, and that usually meant Hartmut had to take a leak.

  “When capitalism fails and all the economies have been eaten up by greed, when common sense prevails, my time will come again.” He stood up and staggered toward the bathroom.

  At least Hartmut still had hope. That was more than you could say for the others. Peter doubted that common sense would ever prevail. Pornographic magazines were displayed in storefronts and cheap vodka sat on the shelves at a height any child could reach; young people sniffed glue and lighter fluid in the back alleys, and teenage prostitutes from the Baltics lowered the prices for a blow job. He lived his life in full recognition that nothing would get better tomorrow or the day after. The future was no longer something he’d been promised and that he looked forward to but something he feared. It hung before him like a heavy shadow, black as night. It was still difficult to grasp that he could speak of a country in the past tense. It was supposed to be a reunification, the merging of two countries, but instead, one country had been destroyed, its inhabitants forced to live in the other. Those who’d been discarded sat around this table—the new migrants in Germany.

  41

  ANDREAS

  Copenhagen, March 2008

  It’s been almost one year since Andreas called Lisa. After he’d picked up the phone that night, they’d met in a café, on neutral ground, and had a cup of coffee. Then two days later, she’d called him. She had sensed what he too had recognized when he called her. He knew what he wanted, she said. She’d sensed an energy and ambition that had been absent before. So right there in the café, she’d met a new Andreas, one whom she once again felt attracted to.

  And now they’re lying in bed, the first rays of morning sun beaming through the blinds, drawing stripes on Lisa’s naked skin. His hands had not forgotten her body. They recalled her curves and the tickling sensation in his fingertips whenever he slid them along the small peaks of her spine.

  He drew letters on her back with his finger.

  “What are you writing?” Lisa’s voice is faint from exhaustion.

  “You’ll have to guess.” The letters vanish in her soft skin, but she already knows everything the words are meant to say.

  “Not now.” She turns over and pulls him near. “Are you nervous?” she asks as their lips part. Her breath is sour and warm.

  He shrugs. “Are you going to the paper after?”

  “No, I took the day off.”

  “But don’t you have to go wrap up your work, or whatever you do when you quit?”

  “Not today.”

  Lisa gives his shoulder a squeeze as he climbs out of bed. His foot gets tangled up in her panties on the floor. She rolls over in bed and appears to go back to sleep. For a moment he stands there, enjoying the sight of her back. Then he heads to the living room. He looks around, his eyes settling on the spot where the TV used to be. They’ve sold it.

  He hears Lisa moving around in the bedroom. He loves her sounds, loves the feeling of knowing she’s there. Close.

  He stands by the window, glances across the street, and suddenly she’s right behind him. She puts her arms around him.

  “I never gave my wonderful boyfriend a proper good-bye.” She speaks close to his ear, tickling it. Whether it’s her words or her proximity doesn’t matter. In the beginning she’d called him her new boyfriend, and he’d also felt the change.

  “Dear Andreas, you’ve done it. Congratulations on your master’s degree.”

  As Thomas, his thesis advisor, tells him how he’s always had faith in Andreas’s abilities and how easy it was to be such a diligent student’s advisor, Thorkild begins opening champagne bottles. One of the corks escapes his grasp and smacks the ceiling; particles of plaster land on those sitting directly under it. Elisabeth gives Thorkild a chiding look.

  Andreas finished his thesis in six months. He dug into the work with a new sense of resolution, working around the clock, and today is his reward.

  Elisabeth has brought glasses in a little picnic basket, and she hands them out as Thomas continues to talk. As they toast Andreas, his mother smiles proudly and gives him a peck on the cheek.

  “There’s a house for sale down the road. You’d love it,” she says.

  He nods absentmindedly. He has yet to tell her that he and Lisa are moving to Berlin, and he intends to wait a little longer.

  Elisabeth clinks her glass with a spoon and begins to speak. He looks at Lisa. She looks lovely. He forgets to listen and just enjoys the sight of her in the tight black dress. She’s only fifteen weeks along, but they’ve both noticed the little bump, the slight arch of her dress, which others will notice only later. When the baby arrives, it’s going to be cramped in the apartment o
n Kopenhagener Strasse. He smiles without realizing he’s doing so, and the others mistake this for pride at Elisabeth’s words.

  42

  PETER

  Berlin, October 2006

  He feels the eight beers in his blood as he gets to his feet. The door is his point of orientation, and he staggers toward it. The smokers are standing outside, covering the sidewalk with their cigarette butts. He mumbles, “See you later,” and heads home.

  On the sidewalk lies another victim of life’s beatings, a homeless man propped against a storefront, his legs forming a barrier to Peter’s section of sidewalk. The homeless man glances up at Peter with bloodshot eyes, and Peter stops. The man’s eyes are glazed over, like his own. He holds out a plastic bucket, one of those ice cream tubs you buy at the supermarket. There’s some change inside. Peter turns away, studies the window display, and pulls out his wallet. The homeless man’s eyes light up, but Peter gets a different idea. On a whim, he decides to buy a new coffee maker, one that’s less noisy. He steps over the man’s legs and enters the store.

  He walks through aisle after aisle of dinnerware and silverware, toasters, and potato peelers with flexible handles. He considers turning around, but then he spots the aisle with thermoses, which means he must be getting close. All the models are made of stainless steel, with lit displays, indicator lights, and buttons. He feels overwhelmed. He reads the signs but doesn’t see the word coffee anywhere. They’re called names like Mocha Master and espresso-something-or-other. He wants to ask the shop assistant, but he knows how ridiculous it will sound if he asks whether they carry a coffee maker with only one button, two at most. He gives up and just wants to go home.

  He turns and sees the homeless man making his way toward him. Peter holds his breath to avoid the man’s stench, then steps back to let him pass, but the man just stops and stands there, staring, forcing Peter to exhale. A rancid smell emanates from the man’s clothes, and Peter senses that the man may have recognized him. Have they seen one another before? Suddenly he’s frightened; the fear creeps into him, spreads under his skin. Does he know that face hiding beneath the dirt and the beard? The man’s eyes are accusatory. The stench is nauseating. Peter spins on his heels and heads down the silverware aisle, past the kitchen utensils and carving sets. He looks back. The man is following him. The homeless man removes a chef’s knife from a shelf.