The Girl Behind the Wall

by Mandy Robotham

  ‘What’s happening, Gerda? It’s coming again!’ Ruth had panted. With such a quick labour and no other midwife to hand, Gerda was forced to place the newly born Jutta, at just ten minutes old, into the nearest clean receptacle, a wooden box that Rolf had recently crafted. She lay wrapped and silent as her womb companion slid feet first from the confines of its mother, a second girl and identical in almost every way, though smaller, feet a little daintier.

  By the time Rolf arrived back from the bar where men traditionally decamped in their arduous wait for news, Ruth was sitting up, cleaned, fed and watered, though still numb from shock as one baby suckled at each available breast. The colour drained from Rolf’s face, and then swiftly refilled to show his delight.

  The babies were easy, even if life wasn’t. Juggling two hungry girls and a household in a world rapidly sliding towards conflict, tension building on the streets, drained everything from Ruth. When Rolf was conscripted early in 1940 to Hitler’s Wehrmacht army, Ruth and the girls moved into the larger Schöneberg apartment with Gerda, Oskar and Hugo, only a year older; it was snug but exactly what the sisters needed, and they shared chores as well as the pleasures of motherhood. Gerda, having been told she ought not to attempt another pregnancy after Hugo, was more than happy to become a semi-surrogate to the girls.

  Living together proved to have been the best decision, meaning the sisters and children were companions as they queued for food, dodging the flying masonry of air attacks, and cowering more than once under the kitchen table while the Allies bombed the buggery out of Berlin, in retaliation for Hitler’s own desecration of Europe. Oskar, exempt from military service as a vital cog in Berlin’s water services, occasionally joined them under the table, when he wasn’t wheeler-dealing in a bar somewhere in Mitte, or ‘obtaining’ something vital at a bombed-out supply depot in Potsdam. The women rarely complained, because it meant they didn’t starve, and they had each other.

  Rolf did return from the Eastern Front in 1944, bruised but relatively intact – although it was obvious to all who knew him that he had left a portion of his soul on the battlefield, along with two of his fingers lost to frostbite. Considering he still had use of two legs and two arms, however, he remained valuable to the increasingly desperate Reich, and was set to work in the defence of Berlin as the Allies marched towards Germany’s capital. It was here that he finally succumbed in April 1945, during the ferocious and bloody Fall of Berlin, defending a city he loved, alongside a cause he’d always hated. Rumour had it that he perished just a mile or so from the family home, having survived the brutality of war thousands of miles to the east, only to die in chaotic crossfire from one of his own battalion – though Ruth still chooses not to believe that precise detail. In her heart, Rolf was simply valiant in the protection of her and the girls, who had decamped from under the kitchen table with Gerda to the basement of their building. This was where the ‘liberating’ Soviet soldiers found them: filthy and afraid, the children wide-eyed and silent.

  It was the twins, subsequently, who proved to be the family’s saviours. Even now, women in Berlin can hardly speak of the atrocities that followed Germany’s surrender, many of them victims at the hands of a hungry and bitter Soviet army, starved of female company. Survival was in one of two ways: capitulating to the Red Army marauders or befriending them. By pure chance they came under the gaze of a somewhat kindly Russian colonel, who’d left his own identical twin girls back in Moscow, around the same age. The sight of nine-year-old Jutta and Karin – tall, dark and willowy, with their sea-green eyes – brought big, burly Yuri Kalinov to tears. In exchange for the simple company of a family, he brought them food and the security of his rank. Whether it was fate or just good luck in meeting Yuri, it nonetheless kept them alive, especially since Oskar had been forced into hiding on the city’s outskirts.

  Yuri left Berlin in 1946 and the Red Peril diluted in time, but money still needed to be made. With Oskar gone, it was down to Ruth, as the youngest and fittest, to take to the streets as a trummerfrauen, a ‘rubble woman’, part of the army of wives and mothers hauling mounds of debris from bombed-out buildings strewn across the city. She arrived home each night exhausted and plastered in the grime of defeat, the girls ritually washing and oiling the ribbons of flesh on her battered hands. It was clear that Ruth left part of her soul among the broken bricks and dust, though she rarely spoke of the bodies they found: some long decayed, some kept fresh by being packed in concrete, others entwined in a last embrace before the certainty of death.

  The long winter of the Berlin Blockade of 1948 proved another draw on the women’s already spent resources, reminding them all of empty bellies and hunger pangs. In a currency war with the West, the Russians closed off road supply routes to West Berlin, leaving the ‘island city’ marooned. The Allies were forced to keep their political stronghold afloat for almost eleven months, with plane upon plane loaded with food and fuel, only a little of which made its way into the Voigt household; even now, Jutta painfully recalls the sight of her mother hovering outside a local café for any leftovers in those weeks when Oskar and his black-market supplies were conspicuously absent.

  Cold and hungry as they were, it also marked the beginning of a very Cold War. That same war that has just become a good deal chillier.

  So yes, Gerda is right, as she pours her concerned gaze into Jutta: Ruth cannot live through the trauma again. Not after Rolf and, with it, a third of her life. One more third in Karin is unthinkable.

  ‘Try to ring the hospital again, will you, Jutta, my love?’ Gerda says.

  Jutta does as she is asked, though she holds out little hope. Yet, the constant ringing on the other end is finally answered, and the doctor summoned to the phone.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she murmurs into the receiver. ‘How ill? But I thought you said that the operation had gone well?’

  She listens intently and with horror, and Jutta feels the older women close behind her, straining to catch each word.

  ‘How long until you know?’ Jutta questions again, panic rising as her heart deflates. ‘She will be all right, won’t she?’

  6

  Relapse

  13th August 1961, East Berlin

  Karin floats above herself, half in and half out of something like life, she thinks with a strange clarity. It’s less the shroud of anaesthetic and more as if she’s actually perching on a cloud over her own body – like those pictures of cherubs reclining in a puffy haze that she remembers from Sunday school, when she wondered why they didn’t just fall through the cotton mist. Karin feels she might easily fall now. But to where? Is it just her own shell below her, or something like hell?

  ‘I’ve no doubt it’s an infection, but it’s come on swiftly,’ someone is saying below the cloud, Dr Simms possibly. There’s a male grunt alongside and mutterings about ‘antibiotics’. She senses the sheet being pulled back, releasing the roaring furnace of her body.

  ‘Ice!’ she wants to shout, but can’t. ‘Please, just bury me in ice!’ Instead, she watches intently as the two heads bend over her own body and peer at the red gash on her belly, and perhaps even hears them sniff at it, muttering some more.

  ‘Prepare the theatre, Nurse,’ one voice says, and Karin wonders if they will transport her there on her little cloud, or whether her fiery body will soon burn through its candy-floss fibres and then she’ll simply drop to the floor with a great thud.

  ‘Where are her family?’ someone asks. ‘We should let them know. Just in case.’

  ‘They’re in the West. She’s a West Berliner.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  And then the white veil closes over, sucks in against her flesh and she’s back below, in her body again, she imagines. All she hears is the rattling wheels of a gurney beneath her, and she opens her eyes briefly to see the faint, white haze of Dr Simms above.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he says.

  7

  The Scar

  13th August 1961, West Berlin

 
Jutta needs to get out. The nerves of her mother are knitting into a tangled mess; she understands Ruth’s level of angst after that phone call with the hospital, and she wants desperately to comfort her, but fretting within four walls will not help Karin. Jutta has her own anxiety to work through, and the apartment is fogged with fear.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Ruth says with surprise as Jutta pulls on her sandals.

  ‘Just to see what’s going on out there,’ she says.

  ‘But we’ve got the radio,’ her mother protests. ‘And Hugo will bring back news.’ She says it like he’s been sent out to fetch a loaf of bread.

  ‘I know, but I want to see for myself,’ Jutta replies. ‘I need some air.’

  Ruth looks disappointed, but Gerda gives her niece a look from the kitchen that says: You go on, I’ll look after her, and Jutta loves her aunt all the more.

  It feels strange on the street, with clusters of people still moving about, though with little direction. And now that she’s outside, Jutta isn’t sure where to go, feeling there’s only so long you can stare at barbed wire and concrete. There’s an undercurrent of unease, a hum of disquiet, though no loud voices. But then, she wouldn’t hear them all the way over in Schöneberg, in the west side of the West. Jutta sees a neighbour from the same block across the street, the one her mother calls ‘the hippy’, and she holds up a hand in greeting. You couldn’t call it a wave, because it’s anything but cheery.

  ‘Are you going to the Gate?’ he cries. ‘There are crowds gathering, though it’s okay.’

  By ‘okay’ Jutta thinks he must mean there’s no violence. Not yet anyway. Hugo has already reported across the airwaves that crowds have gathered on the East side, moving around the city’s main thoroughfare of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse in shoals. But still, no one knows what to do. Continued bewilderment is the GDR’s biggest advantage, more effective than a cosh at this moment.

  The evening sun is still strong as Jutta heads through the leafy and eerily quiet Tiergarten and up towards the Gate, not knowing if it’s her own will or curiosity driving her limbs. If Karin were here now, she would be right by my side, she thinks, urging us to go, always keen to hear people’s opinions, though never loud herself. ‘A subtle revolutionary,’ she remembers labelling her sister once during her art school days, and Karin had laughed, with her wide, enticing smile.

  She has to close her eyes and work hard on imagining Karin’s face. It’s not as if she can simply look in the mirror and remind herself, because Jutta cannot for the life of her see the resemblance. She knows it’s there – in pictures she recognises two babies with the same features: girls dressed in identical outfits, two women who sport the same long, black hair, green eyes and distinct aquiline nose that Karin has always hated and Jutta doesn’t mind so much. But in the mirror, it doesn’t translate. She and Karin are so different and yet complementary; truly two halves of one soul. Yes, they’ve thought of separation, talking in the dark of their bedroom after the lights go out. They each want something different from life, keen to find partners, even husbands, and that means their lives will fork. Inevitably divide. But not yet. They hadn’t planned for it so soon. And not in this way. Not with an ugly scar forcing them apart.

  As Jutta reaches the Gate, a smaller portion of the not very substantial crowd makes a surging motion in response to water cannons being used across the wire against the throngs of people on each side. Each is whistling a high-pitched, tuneless complaint, but it’s not clear who the targets are: the military, other Berliners, or the Gate itself, just for representing a barrier in the first place. There are shouts on the West side of ‘Away with the goatee beard!’ – a direct dig at the GDR’s leader Walter Ulbricht and his distinctive facial hair. Jutta hovers on the edge of the gathering, next to a man with a small transistor clamped to his ear who acts as a conduit in shouting to the crowd: ‘Two have escaped at Treptower and one swam across the Spree,’ to a small cheer, then: ‘There are more crowds at Wollankstrasse.’

  On the other side of the wire – Jutta reflects at how quickly it becomes ‘the other side’ in the collective mind – a sudden orange glow appears as someone tosses a Molotov cocktail at the East German line, only to hear the sinister hiss of a water jet dampen its radiance and the dissent of the one who threw it. They can hear the muffled protests as he’s bundled away by men in uniform and some who aren’t – Stasi disguised as protesters. Overhead, the rotors of an Allied helicopter drone as it circles near to the West side. Jutta squints upwards, and imagines the pilot’s bird’s-eye view, wondering if they can clearly see the zig-zag line from north to south: a grey, jagged incision fully laid out across an entire city.

  In the groups surrounding Jutta on the West side, disquiet and unrest bubbles, simmers, bubbles again, but flashes of true anger are drowned by sadness and steeped in helplessness, and there’s no one person brave enough to lead the opposition. The man with the radio reports that Mayor Willy Brandt is not at the Wall because he’s making an impassioned speech at the West Berlin parliament, labelling the growing insult as ‘the barrier fence of a concentration camp’, and calling on the Allies to send reinforcements to match the Soviets. At the same time, he’s asking West Berliners to exercise restraint on the streets, to not give the East Germans any reason to retaliate.

  ‘So, what should we do?’ the man with the radio asks. ‘Protest in whispers?’

  ‘He’s good with his words, that Brandt fella,’ someone else moans, ‘but he doesn’t have any power, does he? He can ask the Allies all he likes, but what are they going to do?’ He spreads his hands outwards and twists his head side to side. ‘They’re not here now, are they?’

  Where does that leave ordinary Berliners, Jutta thinks, the ones with half their lives on the other side? She’s suddenly exhausted – by the day, by the loss and emotion, and by the futility of standing in the street doing virtually nothing, realising now that being nearer to the Wall makes her no closer to Karin. They remain poles apart.

  Oskar is still absent when Jutta gets home, though Ruth and Gerda hardly seem to notice, still so wrapped in their own distress. Hugo is working but has dropped in for some food, warning his mother he may need to sleep at the station overnight to monitor the news feeds.

  ‘I know he’s keen but it can’t be good to miss out on so much sleep,’ Gerda says to Jutta, though there is continued pride in her voice that her son is out there, helping to weave the city’s history into something palpable, doing a service of sorts. She says they’ve tried to ring the hospital for news, but with no luck, and her voice tries to relay optimism. ‘I’ve told your mother we’ll try again first thing tomorrow. The Charité’s a good hospital, the oldest in Berlin, and the best. I know they’ll look after her,’ Gerda says, though it sounds to Jutta more as though she’s trying to reassure herself.

  Ruth is just drifting to sleep, Gerda having administered one of her small supply of sleeping tablets she keeps back for ‘special needs’, and Jutta feels guilty at her own relief; her mother has always been a source of strength, and Jutta knows that she owes her the same now, but she can’t bear to rake over the same embers of anxiety repeatedly tonight. She needs silence and a quiet corner of her mind to contemplate – and her own bed so that she might bury her face within its pillows and expel her sadness into its fibres.

  In their bedroom, shafts of moonlight lie across Karin’s bed, and Jutta has to close her eyes to the void. The radio chatter that Gerda finds so comforting drifts down the hallway: the voice reports around sixty Berliners have made their way across since the ‘birth’ of the Wall around twenty hours before – rushing the wire, swimming the Teltow canal and creeping their way across small areas not yet permanently patrolled, often patches of allotments backing onto the border, places where it’s sliced indiscriminately through public places. She muses over the strange description: the ‘birth’ of something so ugly and divisive. Babies are born, and they are beautiful. Birth is beautiful; it’s an unspoken fact in t
he Voigt–Zelle household. What happened today amounts to a growth, a weed of the type that drives upwards through dirt, extracting oxygen from the air, just as the wire today sucked hope from an entire city and its people.

  She turns her head – such thoughts take her mind from the real weight, for a few seconds. But it’s still there, because Karin isn’t. Jutta pushes her ear into the pillow, hard enough to hear the whooshing of her own blood pounding, the pulse of her own life that she might, just might, imprint onto Karin – to keep her alive.

  Please Karin, fight hard – for Mama. For me. Please.

  8

  Surfacing

  14th August 1961, East Berlin

  Karin rises again to the surface, sucking in bubbles of air she’s convinced are out there somewhere.

  ‘Fräulein Voigt …’ A touch on her arm, one part of her that mercifully doesn’t hurt. ‘Karin, can you hear me?’

  It’s a woman’s voice, older, matronly. Karin twitches a response, and then feels the sheets being rearranged. Do they always have to fuss so? Gerda doesn’t do that, even when we’re ill, she thinks. Her lucidity rises and falls again – she remembers being in the hospital, though little after that. It’s easy to suppose that’s where she is, still, and the disinfectant smell confirms it. Eyes closed, she senses more bodies moving into the space around her, a presence around her toes; someone coughs.