‘So everyone, this is Fräulein Voigt, twenty-four years of age, presented with acute appendicitis …’ Dr Simms’ voice, though more formal, drifts in and out. ‘… Initial operation to remove ruptured appendix … secondary infection, returned to theatre and abraded operatively. Antibiotics are ongoing. Any questions?’
‘How long for recovery?’ a young male voice asks.
‘Possibly a week or so now, with the added complication of infection,’ Simms replies with authority. Someone else asks about ‘prognosis’ and Simms answers swiftly: ‘Good.’ It’s what Karin grasps onto as the space twists around her, fading in and out. She crawls her hand to the edge of the bed, searching for Jutta. Why isn’t she here?
Where clarity fails, Karin falls back to meandering in the comfort of her memory, unable to remember a time when Jutta wasn’t there. Some at school called them ‘twinny’, as if they were like those Siamese twins physically joined at the hip. Karin never minded the association of closeness, since she’s always loved being a twin, but she hated the presumption that they were each half a person. In her mind, she and Jutta simply created a bigger whole, radiating strength from one to the other. It’s something she could do with now.
So where is Jutta, when she needs the touch of her sister’s hand the most? Didn’t she hear something about the border – a Wall? Or was that just in her dreams? She looks into the blackness of her lids, trying to imagine Jutta across the tiny divide between their beds at home, conjuring the smell of their room, her sister’s fresh soap smell and her eiderdown as the best medicine.
9
A New Dawn on the Divide
14th August 1961, West Berlin
When Jutta wakes to a blue sky and the early promise of summer sun, it takes several seconds for reality to dawn. Whatever happened overnight, Berlin is certain to be changed; older, maybe wiser, but still cruelly dissected. In her clear and colourful dreams, wildly painted bulldozers came and tore down the grey wire, but since the marauding group was led by GDR leader Ulbricht, she can easily separate fact from fantasy. The wire will still be there: steely and ugly, heavy and unyielding.
‘Where is everyone?’ She stifles a yawn as Gerda sets down coffee in front of her in the kitchen.
‘Your mother’s still sleeping, Oskar was up and out early and Hugo slept at the station.’
‘Have you tried ringing the Charité?’ Jutta asks.
‘Several times since six a.m., but they’re not picking up. How can a hospital not answer the phone?’ Gerda is irritated, despite her heartfelt allegiance to nurses and midwives everywhere. Jutta feels a new anxiety dawning; something doesn’t feel right.
‘We’ll just keep trying,’ she says to her aunt.
‘Will you go to work?’ Gerda pitches.
‘I have to – no reason not to. When I’m there, I’ll ring Mama’s office and tell them she’s sick. And Karin’s place too.’ She looks at Gerda, who nods in agreement. Ruth is sick – sick of distress and loss, and ever weary of her dull desk job.
She passes Hugo on the outer stairs as she heads out, noting he looks grey and beyond tired. ‘Long night?’ she asks.
‘You could say that.’ But his eyes sparkle with the knowledge of what he’s seen – real news being made, a witness to history. He can’t help it. ‘Any news on Karin?’ he asks, a portion of the glimmer receding when Jutta tells him the latest. ‘She’ll be all right, though, won’t she?’
‘I hope so.’ What else can she say? That deep, dense tugging in her heart, the one signalling that her other half will pull through, well, that’s just a feeling. It’s not science. It’s not reliable. She can’t pledge assurances to her mother, in case nature and its cruel streak wins out. It’s only that fragile thread of hope coupling her and Karin that allows Jutta to step through the door and put one steadfast foot in front of the other.
The streets are quieter than normal, and yet still industrious. Much like her mother’s descriptions of the war, and her own memories of the ’48 blockade, life has to go on. Even torn in half, Berlin needs to function. Jutta’s short journey towards the university library where she works doesn’t take her towards the border, but she can picture a scene where confusion still reigns, not least among the ten thousand or so grenzgängers – Berliners who traverse the border every day for work. Some will have turned up on the East side, lunch in their bags, hopeful of getting through to a workplace and the wage it brings. If they aren’t allowed across today, will they be allowed permits once the dust has settled?
It seems unlikely, since everyone now knows the true motivation for the Wall. It’s not – as the Eastern politicians claim publicly – to stop the insidious evil of capitalism infecting the GDR state, but quite the opposite: to halt the haemorrhage of East Germans bleeding out through the border, using West Berlin as the passage to a life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Once the escapees reach West Berlin, they are fed through the refugee centre at Marienfelde, processed and flown out to a new life in West Germany 160 or more kilometres away.
The seepage has steadily increased since the GDR came into being in 1949 – three and a half million so far and reaching a record flow of late. In recent months, thousands of families have crowded the small refugee centre, clutching their lives in a single suitcase. Everyone in Berlin knows of East Germany’s ‘brain drain’, with doctors, teachers and engineers fleeing to the West, leaving some towns in East Germany without a solitary teacher for their schools. GDR leaders see that for communism to have any chance of succeeding, it must have workers. And yet those workers are quitting the country in droves, escaping what they view as a lifetime of austerity, hemmed in by the Party and all it represents. So the Wall is not a ‘protection barrier’, but a steely way of stitching up a heavily bleeding wound. For good. It’s merely a bonus if they succeed in barring the wicked capitalists of West Berlin.
This is what frightens Jutta the most: the GDR’s determination to plug the tiniest of holes, to seal every last crack. It means she will be forced to rely on the goodwill and the mercy of the state in allowing her sister to slip back through. And that’s a dependence which makes her very, very uneasy.
The university campus and its library is relatively quiet, as is usual in the summer break, but it has that buzz afflicting all of Berlin right now, with a constant whispering conjecture in corners of a building that ordinarily encourages a near silence. Jutta rings her mother’s office and relays her white lie; despite their sympathy, she can imagine the irritation among Ruth’s fellow office workers, with every business suddenly in uproar. Calling Karin’s boutique is easier, since she is genuinely sick, and, when they naturally assume she is in a Western hospital, Jutta feels too weary to explain fully. Once Karin is back, they won’t need to know.
Next, she rings the Charité while mentally calculating her ‘to-do’ list for the day, anticipating a lengthy ringing before someone answers. As a result, Jutta is not prepared for the cavernous, dull and endless tone – worse than the unanswered ring – and it sends a thunderbolt to her heart. It constitutes nothing. And everything. She can feel her lungs emptying in a second, still consciously scooping in breath as her colleague, Heidi, comes into the office.
‘Have you tried ringing anyone on the East side?’ Jutta says nervously.
‘No point,’ Heidi comes back, voice clipped, face grave. ‘Didn’t you know? They cut the phone lines this morning. Telex as well. And the post – no mail back and forth.’
‘Until when?’ Jutta manages, and Heidi simply shrugs.
Jutta replaces the receiver. They have nothing now; no strands of communication left. Only the invisible thread that she and Karin have, cultivated to be strong and unyielding over the years, remains. And with no word, no touch, no way to extend a message that they will get her back, she wonders how long the thread will endure before it frays towards a breaking point.
Jutta’s manager is sympathetic, since his own mother lives in the East, and grants her leave for the day. She thinks
of calling in on Hugo for access to his press couple, to relay another note, but he’s getting much-needed sleep. Instead, she heads to the town hall in Schöneberg for … she doesn’t know what. Guidance? Advice? This is in no handbook, there’s no contingency for half a city being detached, out on a limb. Maybe she’ll find someone with an idea, or a modicum of common sense, because the world appears rapidly to be running out of it.
The town hall corridors are running with anxiety and people harbouring papers and worried expressions. Through the confusion, Jutta squeezes, talks and pushes her way through a small throng and into an upstairs office and towards the desk of one Hans Fleisch, ‘senior administrator’. He snaps his head up at her with uncontrolled irritation and she recognises the drowning-in-paperwork expression, coupled with a please leave me alone or I might scream feeling that she sometimes experiences.
‘Yes?’ He’s gone back to scratching at a pile of forms.
‘Are you dealing with requests for travel permits?’ Jutta ventures. ‘Only downstairs they said it was y—’
‘Yes, it’s me.’ Hans is not enjoying his job today, clearly. ‘But there are very few permits being issued. Don’t get your hopes up.’
She deflates, visibly and audibly, a small moan escaping from somewhere inside, enough to cause Hans to look up and gesture her to sit in the chair opposite his desk. He lays down his pen, too.
‘Sorry,’ he sighs. ‘It’s just that I’ve had to say it countless times today. I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.’
Jutta has never set eyes on Hans before, but she imagines that he has aged today, his skin taking on the arid look of the paper pile beside him. Her own features sag. She should have expected it – her first port of call was never going to be a success, not in this new chaos. He clearly reads her distress, tries to offer what he can, which isn’t much.
‘Why do you need to go into the East?’ he says. There can be no want about it, since all human traffic is heading the other way.
‘It’s my sister, she’s over there in …’ Jutta can no longer save her tears for solitude, and Hans offers her a tissue from the box on his desk.
‘Thank you … sorry,’ she sniffs, and goes on to explain about Karin. ‘Surely, she can’t be the only one caught on the other side?’ Jutta avoids using the words ‘stuck’ or ‘trapped’, because they have too much finality.
‘No, she isn’t, and some West Berliners with papers have been able to talk themselves across the border,’ he says. ‘But it’s hit and miss at the moment. They should be allowed back eventually’ – there’s heavy emphasis on the ‘should’ – ‘within a certain time frame, but I have no route to query anything, with all the communications down.’ He reaches for a pack of cigarettes, then hesitates.
‘You can fill in a form to request a permit for yourself to visit your sister’ – he lays a hand instead on a large pile of forms already completed – ‘but it might be several days, or even weeks. The GDR are already sensitive about visitors helping to plan escape attempts. Did you know that sixty-six came across yesterday, in just one day?’ Hans can’t disguise a certain admiration in his voice for those who jumped, swam or simply hurtled through with their courage and cunning, while Jutta focuses on ‘sensitive’ and wonders if building a Wall can ever go hand in hand with such an attribute.
‘But what if my sister is recovered before I get a permit and she’s ready to come home?’ Jutta asks.
‘Then it’s up to the hospital to appeal on her behalf. I suspect she’ll be vetted by the security services and then taken to a checkpoint where you can meet her.’ He offers a weak smile as encouragement, fingers the cigarette packet again.
To Jutta, however, this does sound more promising – something routine and relying less on the humanity of one individual, though it doesn’t stem her yearning to see Karin immediately. She fills out the form and leaves it with Hans Fleisch, turning her back on his heavy sigh as he goes back to his scratching.
Outside, Jutta sits on a bench in front of the town hall, knowing she should go home and relay even her small amount of news to Mama and Gerda, and yet not wanting her heart to be further deadened by the heavy mood of the house. Equally, she can’t face returning to work, sitting on her anticipation within the hush of the library for all those hours. Jutta feels empty and baseless, the void sitting alongside a sensation that is entirely new in her lifetime – loneliness.
She gets up from the bench and walks towards the western end of the Tiergarten, to Berlin’s zoo, not consciously, though she knows where her feet are taking her – where Karin is piloting her. It’s early afternoon when she arrives at the busy interchange on Kurf’damm and sees its two most prominent landmarks: the partially bombed-out Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, craggy and grey in its old age, and almost opposite – in total contrast – the modern, circus-like red and white striped awning of Kranzler’s café.
There are tables outside on the wide pavement, but Jutta climbs to the circular balcony and sits at their table, hers and Karin’s. Mama insists this new Kranzler’s can’t hold a flame to the ornate original on Unter den Linden, bombed out during the war, but it’s the place where Karin most loved – loves – to people-watch with her sketchbook, spying on the well-dressed women parading up and down the busy thoroughfare. She sometimes makes a lightning sketch, adapting and tweaking the image, holing herself up in their bedroom in the next days, her heavy electric sewing machine whirring at pace until she emerges with the new creation draped over her body and fitting to perfection. Jutta, who can barely sew on a button, is endlessly aghast, envious, and hungry for her own version of the design, though Karin is careful to alter it so that they look less like ‘twinny’ and more like well-dressed West Berliners.
The street is busy, as always, and Jutta lingers over her coffee, trying to read the atmosphere of this new Berlin in throwing off her melancholy. There are clusters of people collected on the street, some with hands gesticulating wildly and their necks at full stretch with impassioned speech. It’s not hard to imagine the topic of conversation. She wonders how much each person has invested in the Wall – a mother, a close friend, or a cousin twice removed on the other side. Everyone will know someone behind the barbed wire; no one is untouched.
But there is one question more than any on everyone’s lips, familiar to Germans both East and West: after two world wars lost and a city in ruins, how was this ever allowed to happen?
10
Recovery
14th August 1961, East Berlin
The eventual smile on Dr Simms’ face is everything to Karin – he gives nothing away while looking at the chart hooked on the end of her bed, nor when he draws the curtains around and scrutinises her wound, though she watches carefully for any twitch to his nostrils.
‘You’ve reacted very well to the treatment, Fräulein Voigt,’ he says at last. ‘I imagine that’s what it is to be young and fit.’
‘Does that mean I can go home soon?’
The smile drops a little. ‘Perhaps in two or three days,’ he assures her. ‘Your body is weak, and it’s taken quite a beating from the infection. We need to get you up and about first, or we risk a relapse. And we have to apply for a travel permit so you can go back to your family.’
Somehow, the way he makes no mention of the Wall is jarring, as if she is about to embark on a holiday or a pleasure trip.
‘Do my family know how I am?’ she goes on. ‘Has anyone spoken to them?’
‘Only the day you were brought in, after the operation, and again when your condition worsened,’ Dr Simms replies, ‘but not since. There are no telephone lines open, or ways to post them a letter.’
In reaction to Karin’s crestfallen expression, he moves closer and lowers his voice. ‘But I think I might be able to help. I have one favour I can use until we get the order for you to go.’
Karin’s mood lightens in one minute, darkens the next, seesawing as she weighs up the news trickling in. Nurse Selig has already filled in the
details since her brain threw off the anaesthetic and its foggy shroud. Perhaps her gratitude for waking, for being alive, dampened the shock at first and she hasn’t the energy to feel worried. She’s horrified, of course, at the Wall itself, feeling the betrayal of every Berliner, but it explains why Jutta, Mama and Gerda are not by her side. They are not cross with her, as she’d imagined in her drugged-up state. Still, she feels hopeful that in a few days an ambulance will take her to the border, where she may have to hobble across the threshold, but she doesn’t care because they will be waiting, in Oskar’s old truck, to throw their arms around her and envelop her in their soft, caring folds, like the old eiderdown. Soon, Karin thinks, soon I will be home. I will be safe. Then, when I’m well, I can help fight the injustice.
‘So, can I try now, to get out of bed?’
11
Beads of Hope
14th August 1961, West Berlin
Hugo is awake and looking less like an apparition when Jutta arrives home around four o’clock, though for a young man he appears to have aged. He raises his eyebrows and gestures with his head that they should meet outside once the maternal grilling is over.
She offers the news of a potential permit to her mother and Gerda with an upbeat tone designed to relay confidence, leaving out Herr Fleisch’s cynicism. The two women have garnered promises of help from the local parish priest and are collecting beads of hope like charms on a bracelet. Jutta goes along with it, though she’s inclined to question how much power a man of the cloth has against the might of Soviet communism, and what increasingly looks to be a long and large concrete dam.
Hours later, and several floors up, on the building’s roof, the pair are sitting in two of the three deckchairs previously arranged in a circle. Hugo has collapsed the third, mindful that it can only remind Jutta of the missing member of their trio, and he’s blowing cigarette smoke towards a molten sun.
The Girl Behind the Wall Page 5