The Girl Behind the Wall

by Mandy Robotham

  Hugo blows out his frustration in smoke. ‘I can’t be sure, but I think so.’ He looks directly at her. ‘I’m sorry, Jut. I didn’t want to believe it, let alone know how to tell you. How much heartache it’s caused you and Aunt Ruth. And my mother. I’m so sorry.’

  She signals to him for a rare drag on his cigarette; she can’t feel angry at Hugo, nor muster much rancour towards Oskar if she’s honest, even if he damn well deserves it. Some contempt for her uncle’s weakness, maybe, but Jutta has watched him wither as the Wall has climbed higher and more robust. Karin’s hurt, and the family’s pain at her absence – Oskar has seen it, assuaged his guilt in alcohol, watched his wife fret and his son lose respect. He is not unscathed. Since the Wall, everyone has lost.

  57

  Life of a Messenger

  16th September 1963, East Berlin

  For once, the sky seems brighter over on the East side and Jutta turns her face to the sun, hoping to absorb its energy; she’s already exhausted, by both the atmosphere in the apartment and her attempts to appease her mother’s anger at Oskar. It’s normally Karin’s forte, being the peacemaker, and Jutta finds it taxing stepping into her sister’s shoes. Again.

  She needs her wits about her today, as Axel’s mission is trickier, and possibly riskier. This time, she’s to deliver a message as before, but then return several hours later to a different venue for the reply. Her first port of call, though, is the Charité, where she will slip a note into the wall behind the hospital building, hoping that Karin checks it at the end of her shift, in time for them to meet afterwards. She prays Karin will have left a letter, too, to appease Mama’s hunger for contact, a need that’s beginning to wear Jutta down.

  With summer waning, Jutta has brought a light scarf and a wide-brimmed hat so they can meet in a café and still appear distinct, though she suspects that, for once, she will look a good deal more stressed of the two. And if Karin notices, as she is certain to, how can she mask that it’s Oskar’s greed and stupidity which has kept them apart since the Wall went up?

  The hospital grounds are sparsely populated, although Jutta has to linger nervously for several minutes in waiting for two nurses to vacate the bench behind the main building. Finally, she sits and, with no one in sight, feels the low wall behind, locating the loose, mossy brick which mercifully reveals a tiny envelope addressed to Mama. She pulls it out and replaces it with her own, folded note written in a simple code she and Karin have worked out. Leaving the hospital grounds, Jutta’s heart spasms – so much duplicity even before the day’s really begun! She draws in a long breath: task one completed, two to go, and then the wait to see if Karin has received the message and can meet her at Café Sybille. Already, it seems interminable.

  It’s perhaps not the best idea to stay in the same area as the Charité, but the Presse Café is in easy walking distance and her nerves are craving some familiarity. She can be certain, too, that Karin won’t be there, so her visit is unlikely to cause any confusion with the bar staff.

  By the time the hot, strong liquid licks at her taste buds, Jutta is persuaded she’s made the right decision. Only it’s reversed in the next minute, with an invasion into her private bubble.

  ‘You must like it in here as much as I do,’ a man’s voice says.

  Jutta controls the jerk of her head just in time, looks up casually instead – is she getting better, or just more experienced at this subterfuge?

  ‘Oh, hello.’ Again the tempering of her voice, returning his smile. He’s only vaguely familiar. Who is he? Is it me or Karin who knows him?

  ‘I see you’re still on the same book – you did say it was slow going.’ He nods at the Seghers novel in her lap and it’s a nudge to the edges of her memory. She scans her brain furiously for recall of her previous visits to the café. Was he the one who mentioned a sister with a liking for books? And didn’t she see him in the street afterwards, talking to a Vopo? So much has happened since then.

  ‘Uh yes,’ she manages. ‘But it’s just a quick stop for me today.’

  ‘Well, in that case, do you mind?’ He gestures at the empty chair opposite. ‘It’s pretty crowded in here today.’

  It’s not. The main cluster of tables are occupied, but behind the pillars a couple are free. He sits down before Jutta has a chance to reply, and every sense within her is immediately on high alert. Does he know something? Is he angling for information? She can’t imagine why the Stasi would send in someone so obvious to probe, a man openly engaged with the authorities. It doesn’t make sense, and yet her nerves are no less frazzled.

  ‘Are you on a day off then?’ he asks, sipping at his own coffee.

  ‘Er, yes. A couple of days’ leave,’ she lies, pressing herself to stop fingering the rim of her cup nervously.

  ‘My aunt used to work at the Charité,’ he goes on. ‘Sometimes I’d meet her in the canteen for lunch; they have nice wurst.’

  Jutta thinks of the soulless lunchroom where she’d first laid eyes on Karin after almost two years apart, recalling it as anything but welcoming.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Is your aunt still there?’

  ‘No, she left.’ He’s murmuring into his cup. ‘Got a better job.’

  ‘Anywhere nice? Maybe I should think of following suit.’ Jutta tries to make light, in treading water with her reactions.

  The boy glances up, sadness swimming in his eyes. ‘She went over the Wall.’

  ‘Oh.’ Here it is. The prod. The test. And it’s far from subtle. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Jutta follows it up by meeting his look firmly, determined not to shy away from the subject, which would only appear worse. I am a loyal communist, she is relaying, and it’s sad your aunt would want to shun the ideal we are creating in the GDR.

  ‘I sometimes wonder …’ he breaks his own gaze, back to the muddy brown of his cup.

  ‘Oh, look at the time!’ Jutta cries. ‘I said I’d meet a friend. I’m sorry, but I have to go. Good to see you again.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, curling his lips weakly in raising a smile. ‘See you around.’

  Jutta is out the door, under the railway bridge and forging down Friedrichstrasse before her head has a chance to ignite any panic. She finds a public toilet and lingers so long inside the cubicle that a woman with a child knocks impatiently on the door and asks if she’s all right.

  The truth is she would rather spend the entire day sitting in the cubicle, among the sour stink of urine, than wander across East Berlin, exposed. For a moment, she thinks of abandoning the message drop and telling Axel it was simply too dangerous because of the boy Vopo. On reflection, though, she worries her handler will view it as a weakness, assessing the portal as having more worth on its own. Her only value to Axel is that she is prepared to use it, again and again. The eternal ghost. And she has to keep it open, just until Karin can make that final break.

  The drop is set for twelve noon, in a bar to the Eastern city boundary. Jutta wanders in and out of shops until the appointed time, finding little that she would want to buy, and then heads to the bar on foot, her ankles already feeling the strain of being on the move for so long. This time the bar is easy to find – though she checks the address at least three times – and reassuringly small and dingy. The waiter responds by bringing her the right box of matches she asks for, along with a Vita Cola. The message itself is smaller than an average envelope, which she slips under the bill, along with her coins. Then, there’s three hours to waste until the reply, several blocks to the north.

  At each point, each corner and every entry to a shop, Jutta employs different techniques to check she isn’t being followed, pointers that she’s picked up from her contact with the fluchthelfers, others that are simply common sense. Wearing lace-up shoes means she’s able to legitimately stop and tie them, and she’s left her sunglasses at home, allowing an excuse to shield her eyes from the sun, as if scanning the horizon in meeting a friend. Her only respite is reading her book on a bench, leaving just enough of the Seghers c
over visible to be noted. Still, she’s exhausted by three p.m. and the appointed pick-up.

  Jutta’s recurring fear is that, aside from her odd encounter with the boy Vopo, it’s been too much like plain sailing. And so it proves. She gives her memorised request over the counter of a small hardware store; the proprietor forces a smile, at the same time wearing a decidedly nervous expression. Instead of handing her the spurious goods she asks for, he says no, he hasn’t got that type and he’ll go into the back to look. Can she wait? His eyes flick left and right, and his nostrils twitch impulsively.

  It throws her, and Jutta shifts from foot to foot. Does she stay and risk it being a trap, with Stasi waiting to pounce in the back of the shop, or turn tail and have some chance of escape?

  The questions roil, seconds fall away and Jutta’s mind swings with every tick of the wall clock: Stay or go? Risk or bail? There’s an old woman alongside, mulling over which type of rat poison to buy, and the shopkeeper returns, hovering anxiously. Now, he has a glint in his eye, but is it his own fear of Stasi capture, or that he’s consciously leading a lamb to the slaughter? Jutta’s indecision is agony, and she has to fight every instinct not to retreat through the exit. Only a desperate need to satisfy Axel – to keep that portal door ajar – fixes her to the spot.

  After what seems like an age, the old woman leaves, clutching her poison. The shopkeeper’s sigh of relief is audible, and he quickly switches on a noisy key-cutting machine and motions for Jutta to step behind the counter. Again, what choice does she have?

  His forehead glistens with sweat as he whispers into the conch of her ear: the reply hasn’t arrived, but there’s word it’s not far away. Two minutes, five at most. The man looks beyond her to the outer shop. She needs to wait, he urges. ‘There are so many depending on it, Fräulein.’

  Again, it’s the emotional blackmail Jutta finds hardest. She’ll discover soon enough if she can trust him: either she walks out of the shop and freely down the road, or is forced into the dark alternative – the back of a Stasi van. But she will never truly know the importance of this message, whether its passage will help one person or fifty, one family or twenty. But do the numbers really matter? If the roles were reversed, she would heap gratitude on anyone willing to help her one and only sister across the Wall. If only Karin would go.

  The seconds bleed into minutes, the man gesturing above the grinding noise for her to sit on a hard wooden stool alongside his workbench. He looks old and weary, and she wonders why he does it, endangers his livelihood and his shop. Can she trust his motives? As if reading her mind, he points to an old dog-eared photo pinned on the wooden surround – a young woman and her two children posing in a garden – and he nods. It’s for them. Maybe he’s working his ticket, gaining favours rather than paying the large sums often demanded to move whole families across, in the boot of a car, or with new passports. Jutta eyes the ceiling-high shelves lined with boxes of nails and screws, the backlog of stock he’s amassed over the years, and she’s certain, just by this man’s look, that he would leave it in a heartbeat to ghost across the Wall with his family in the dead of night, that he wouldn’t once look back on all the hours and days he’s spent in the shop making a world for himself.

  That’s the value of freedom.

  There’s a knock at the back door, faint over the drone of the machine, and he hurries to answer it. Again, no words are exchanged but he arrives back at the workbench and slips a brown envelope into her hand, cocking his hand to signal her to go out the front of the shop. Axel had indicated the same – if any place is under routine Stasi surveillance, they will count the customers in and out, with suspicions raised if the numbers don’t tally.

  Sour bubbles of hot breath erupt in Jutta’s throat as she steps outside, gripping a bag of nails the man has thrust into her hand for show. She can’t help that her eyes sway left and right in searching the vehicles on the road; a Wartburg motors goes by in the bright green livery of the Polizei, but the driver looks to be making a routine sweep, and there’s no hint of an insidious laundry truck trundling behind. Head high, she moves nonchalantly away from the shop, counting each step until she reaches another public toilet and vomits every morsel inside her stomach.

  The wait at Café Sybille is made less arduous by good coffee and the schokoladenkuchen that Jutta not only desires but needs; she hasn’t eaten much all day, and what she has consumed has either been purged or walked off. Before ordering, though, she counts out her Ostmarks in the bathroom – the amount is getting low and, aside from her desire to see Karin, she also hopes to exchange more dollars for Eastern currency.

  Head down and facing the door, Jutta glances up each time the bell tinkles its opening – but no Karin. It’s gone five and she’s almost given up hope, the chocolate cake reduced to crumbs and her coffee down to the dregs. She knows Karin finishes work at four each day, and it wouldn’t take her long to walk or hop on a bus to Sybille. Maybe for some reason she hasn’t checked the drop-off point today. After all, it’s been empty for almost a month now.

  Then, the slight scrape of a chair next to her and a pair of feet slip into view. She doesn’t need to glance upwards, the thread instantly stronger. The relief makes her heart soar, and, for a second, Jutta feels she might just burst into tears. When she does look up, however, Karin’s face causes her own stress to fall away instantly.

  The prospect of Jutta looking the more strained of the two vanishes; Karin looks dreadful. Underneath her thin jacket, she’s hiding her hospital uniform, which is drab enough, but her skin tone matches it, hair roughly scraped back with grips. There’s no style, and no verve in the smile she tries to muster.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Jutta half-whispers.

  Karin’s eyes dim, her lips waver and begin to crimp. ‘Not here,’ she burbles and turns, heading for the door at a pace, forcing Jutta to hurriedly lay down almost all the Ostmarks she has.

  Outside, they link arms instantly and without a word Karin steers them both off the main thoroughfare and into a side street, at the end of which there’s a small square with a bench. It’s there that Karin crumples, sobs seizing her entire body while Jutta holds her tightly, absorbing the shuddering of her sister’s distress.

  Finally, the quivering subsides and Karin draws away, the wetness animating her cheeks a little.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ja-Ja,’ she whimpers. ‘It’s just been building for weeks. Just the sight of you …’

  ‘Haven’t you been able to talk to anyone – Walter, or Otto?’

  There’s a slight shake of the head, tears threatening to flow again.

  ‘But why? Surely Otto would understand?’ Jutta probes gently.

  ‘We’re not …’ Karin struggles to frame the words. ‘We’re not together anymore.’

  Jutta is shocked. While initially sceptical of their commitment, she’s come to see their love as constant, more so since having met Otto. Immediately, she imagines they’ve argued, that he’s refused all talk of the West and turned his back on Karin.

  ‘Since when? Why?’

  ‘Weeks – the day after we last met,’ Karin says. ‘It’s not Otto’s doing. I broke it off.’ The skin around her eyes is now dry and flaky, her voice cracked.

  ‘I can’t do it to him, Ja-Ja,’ she rattles on. ‘What with your … the demands on you, I can’t put him anywhere near a Stasi spotlight, even for a short time. Risking myself is one thing, but him … He’s much better not knowing me.’

  Karin sags under the weight of her explanation and Jutta feels instantly deflated that she is part of the problem. Bloody Axel. Then, a light fights its way through the dense mood; without Otto, there’s nothing to keep Karin in the East. She can ghost back over the Wall – for good. Today. No reason to have to kow-tow to Axel any longer and she can sever those ties. Though she still shoulders her sister’s pain, happiness floods silently through Jutta’s body, making her dizzy with anticipation at Mama’s face, Gerda’s unfettered joy.

  She leaves enough space
for Karin’s sorrow to settle between them, and then says as much. That they will have to be careful, but it’s possible they can do it now, collect some of Karin’s most precious things, though Jutta wonders aloud if Karin will want to say goodbye to Walter and his wife, if it’s safe to do it.

  ‘Oh Ja-Ja, if only it were that simple,’ Karin says, stroking at her sister’s face. Jutta feels the thread jerk, suddenly rigid and uncomfortable. Sometimes, she wishes she didn’t sense so much, certain that what Karin is about to say will put their cord under intolerable strain.

  Karin coughs, her voice croaky. ‘I don’t know if I can come, Ja-Ja, as much as I might want to. I have to stay. Now more than ever.’

  ‘But why? What on earth is keeping you here now?’ Jutta’s tone is strangled. She’s fast losing reason – and patience.

  Karin smiles and frowns in one half of a heartbeat. ‘Because I’m pregnant.’

  58

  A Confession

  17th September 1963, East Berlin

  Karin lingers opposite the square, municipal building, perched on a stone step that’s already made the bones of her behind go numb. But then so much of her is deadened these days, it’s a wonder she notices at all. The workers are streaming out at day’s end, but Karin’s eyes are focused for just one form.

  At 5.05, there he is. Her heart jars at the mere sight of him casually talking to a man as they nod and wave each other goodbye. She pushes her weary body to standing and begins tailing him down the street, needing to walk and skip a little to keep up with his long strides, though noting his shoulders appear stooped. Over the last weeks, he’s left a stream of messages for her, at home and at the Charité, all of which she’s struggled to ignore. The tone is understanding, then pleading, his devotion eloquent on the page. It’s taken every ounce of Karin’s willpower not to reply. Until now. Until Jutta’s wise words cemented her own thoughts. It was a selfless judgement on her sister’s part, but Karin already knew it was the right thing to do; she just hasn’t had the courage of her convictions until now.