The Girl Behind the Wall

by Mandy Robotham

  And how will the authorities explain an off-duty Vopo shot in cold blood on a busy street? They’ll tag him a traitor to the communist cause, who brandished a gun and turned on the law-keepers, regardless of who pulled a weapon first. Something inside Jutta tells her Erich was intent only on protecting her, some kind of knight in shining armour, though she has no clue why and no energy to imagine.

  They drive and drive. The spin of her head and the constant motion of the vehicle in pitch black creates a gnawing nausea and Jutta closes her eyes, a tidal wave of exhaustion flooding through every artery and muscle. She can’t bring herself to think of Karin, or Mama, or Gerda. Hugo too. And Danny. Oh my God, Danny. Something tells her she’ll have plenty of time alone to consider them later. Hours and hours. For now, she just has to concentrate on keeping upright and her wits intact.

  ‘OUT! OUT NOW!’

  Jutta shudders from a half-trance as the van comes to an abrupt stop, doors banging and shouts evident. They’re inside, she can tell that much, with voices echoing off tall surfaces. The door opens and she shies away from a sudden shard of blinding light. A body scrambles in, unlocks the cell door and feels for her wrist. She thinks it’s to unhook the shackles, but they are searching for her watch, and wrench it off in one tug. Only then do they release her from the metal bracelets.

  Already, all four limbs have gone numb. Jutta wonders how many hours they’ve been driving and where in the world she is, how many kilometres from home, her family and the love of Danny. An arm drags her, and she stoops to walk unsteadily down from the van and into the glare of bright, artificial lamps overhead.

  ‘HALT! HEAD DOWN! LOOK AT THE FLOOR! NO TALKING!’

  Eyes to the concrete floor, she sees numerous feet, all in identical boots, struggling to calculate how many limbs or voices as they’re all battering her at once. More shuffling and then she’s led up several steps, chancing a look at what seems like a long corridor. The bleached yellowy bulbs cause her to shy away again from the brightness, burning sharply on her retina.

  If Jutta isn’t scared enough already, she is soon near catatonic with fear as the bottom of each door lining the long corridor comes into view. Grey, drab metal, heavy and thick, with a lock near to the ground. Cells. Prison cells. Each and every one. She’s not sure of the sensation it creates, something close to an unadulterated terror, a pain so great in her insides that she would buckle and fall if not for the numbness alongside.

  I’m in the heart of Stasiland, and no one, but no one, can help me.

  She appears to be the day’s only quarry because there’s no one following, and she’s nudged forward. Jutta can hear one or two cries from behind the doors, but they are soon muzzled by a fierce banging from a guard and shouts of ‘SILENCE!’ The voices obey.

  She’s led into a room, which has bars on the high window, but it doesn’t seem like a cell as such. A woman is waiting there; the unattractive heeled shoes are a giveaway, and Jutta dares to flick her eyes upwards. Ordinarily, she would be glad to see one of her own sex, but the austere expression below the grey, wiry hair tells her this is no ally to womanhood. Two guards follow and she gauges from the space they occupy and the size of their feet that they are men.

  ‘102. Undress,’ the woman says flatly. Jutta can’t help turning towards the guards behind, as if she might ever so politely ask them to leave.

  ‘102, face front!’ the woman barks. ‘They stay. Undress. Everything.’

  Jutta feels her throat constrict and tears move rapidly towards her eyelids. Do not cry, do not cry, she chants inside. It’s the beginning of the end if you cry now.

  Shivering from fear and cold, she begins to peel off her layers and the stony-faced woman approaches. It’s clear they mean to search her. Thoroughly.

  Just don’t flinch.

  Being instructed to lie on the thin mattress in a cell comes as something of a bizarre relief to Jutta, after the violation of the search and the way it’s sapped all energy from her body. That and the pain she feels from their rough treatment. They found nothing, of course – she’s always careful to empty her bag of her West Berlin pass when she ghosts through the Wall, with nothing else to identify her. But they asked no more, not her name or where she comes from or what she is doing in the East. Perhaps it’s because they know already, or perhaps they plan to simply beat it out of her.

  She fingers the cheap nylon two-piece of loose trousers and long-sleeved top she’s been instructed to wear, made of worn material and hugely oversized, with threadbare socks that bear the well-infused sweat of some other poor individual. She’s cold, but daren’t get under the thin, scratchy blanket because they told her not to, to remain instead on top of the bed. Every so often – she can’t tell how long – a guard opens the hatch and peers in, a large red face scowling at her. She turns a little to her side to relieve the pain in her buttock and a mean mouth growls at her: ‘102, lie flat!’ And so she does.

  There is natural light in the cell, but no vision, even if she were to stand on the bed on tiptoe, because the ‘window’ is a mosaic of dirty glass bricks, distorting the unknown world outside to a blur. A small table nudges up to the bed, and there’s a cracked sink and a toilet without a seat or flush handle. Jutta hopes her insides behave, though the unrest in her gut already signals they won’t.

  It’s hours or minutes or … who knows. But her eyelids are just beginning to sag when the clank of locks jolts her awake and the door opens.

  ‘102. Stand up. Eyes down to the floor. No talking.’ It comes out in a series of staccato instructions, as if read by a particularly wooden actor.

  In her socks, she’s pulled from the cell and made to face the wall, the corridor empty, she thinks, except for one other guard. Head down, she’s led along the hallway and through into what feels like another wing; the air changes noticeably, and it’s warmer, a balm wrapping around her. Maybe they’ve changed their minds? But does that mean they’ll go after Karin? That’s worse. Should Jutta persuade them that she is Karin? Her mouth is stale and sour from no fluid since the two coffee mouthfuls at the Presse Café and her brain feels like a collection of brittle abandoned honeycomb, empty cavities where her senses once sat.

  The comfort of warmth ceases on sight of the door she’s led through – a heavy, lockable outer membrane of steel, with a wooden inner door. Padded. Her fear rises and her bowels threaten to mutiny.

  The room, however, is an office rather than a cell; she’s instructed to sit on what looks like a milking stool in front of a desk. Everything in it, aside from a grey plastic phone, is brown. The colour of dung: wallpaper and desk, curtains and chair. A cavern of shit, split only by the light from a window. The door clangs behind her and she’s left alone.

  Jutta’s rear is aching and she’s fidgeting when a door in the side of the room opens and a man in a suit walks in. Also brown, though his hair is sandy. He gives her a desultory smile and sits, placing a large buff file on the table. With the height of his chair against the low stool, Jutta feels as if she is at kindergarten all over again, an adult looming large over her as the tiny child.

  ‘Fräulein Voigt,’ he says, looking up.

  So they know who I am. But do they know which one? She says nothing since it seems like a statement, as if she’s just walked into a job interview.

  ‘I’m hoping you will answer some questions for us?’ In keeping with the general colour scheme, his teeth are nicotine yellow as he smiles. At least he’s not barking at me, Jutta thinks, having already scanned the area for signs of tools used to inflict torture, or cupboards where they might be hidden.

  ‘I … I … what …?’

  ‘Let me tell you first what we know of you,’ he interjects, ‘and you can correct me if I’m wrong. How about that?’ His tone is mildly patronising, but not threatening.

  She gives a slight nod.

  ‘We know that you, Jutta Voigt, are a resident of West Berlin, from Schöneberg, and that you live with your mother, aunt and uncle, and your cou
sin, who works for Radio Free Berlin. Correct?’

  So they know I’m not Karin. There seems little point in denying the obvious truth, though Jutta hesitates. She needs to know more of what she’s agreeing to, but he takes her silence as a yes.

  ‘And until August 1961, you lived with your twin sister Karin in said residence. Until, in fact, the day when the anti-fascist protection barrier was erected.’

  The Wall. If we’re being honest, call it the fucking Wall.

  He goes on: ‘A sister who appears willing to stay in the GDR, with her boyfriend Otto Kruger. Sensible girl – she knows the GDR will give her a good life, in return for her loyalty and hard work.’

  Still, there’s no threat, only fact, but it doesn’t prevent Jutta from sweating inside her pathetic pyjamas, a line trickling down her now aching back.

  ‘The help we need is with your access,’ the man goes on. ‘A tunnel is unlikely, as you don’t appear dishevelled – the mud of underground Berlin is a devil to shake off – and we know you don’t go via a checkpoint.’ He cocks his head, as if they are playing cards and he’s bluffing out an ace, trying to spot the card player’s ‘tell’ in her eyes.

  Jutta remains tight-lipped. Despite Axel’s disloyalty towards her, there’s something about the portal she does not want to reveal. For the other ghosters, and for her. Though if they threaten to harm Karin, she will sing like a canary, without hesitation. It’s not betrayal, merely survival, she reasons. In the meantime, she’ll hoard her knowledge as her bargaining chip.

  They go round and round for what seems like ages. He’s smoking cigarettes and asking questions, but only half-heartedly, and doesn’t seem annoyed when she gives no answers. He never once says she can go home if she reveals the portal, and so Jutta assumes she’s not going home for some time, though she won’t allow her mind to speculate as to how many days, months or years it could be. That’s just too terrifying.

  Finally, as her back is beginning to sting with the effort of staying upright, the man closes the buff file and takes his brown self out of the brown door, saying only, ‘Until next time, Fräulein Voigt’ and showing his yellow teeth.

  Back in the cell, day becomes night, but only because the light fades through the glass bricks. Jutta hears voices crying out, but no sobbing or screaming; the guards clatter up and down, voices snapping orders as presumably other prisoners are taken out. Her bowels finally give out, and the guards leave her to marinade in her own stink before they flush the toilet from outside. The lights go off, although one luminescent bulb above the door switches on what seems like every few minutes and the hatch opens to reveal eyes, and sometimes a mouth. Soon, she even gives up raising her head to see.

  That first night is long and varied. Quite apart from the gripe in her stomach, of emptying and then half-filling with a dry meal of bread and sausage, sleep is a rolling wave of horror and imagination, split by being pulled out of her cell and marched back to the nauseating brown room, where the brown-suited man is waiting, fresh as if he’d just had his morning coffee. The curtains are drawn and the bulb above is yellow and blinding, and Jutta has no idea whether it’s two or five a.m. She squints to avoid the pain it brings to her eyes.

  ‘Hello, Fräulein Voigt.’ And he starts again with the questions. She gives no answers, while he dishes out facts about her family but never once issues a direct threat. Instead, there are throwaway comments, like sideways glances at a school dance, designed to entice. And endless, endless questions.

  ‘Why do you hate communism, Fräulein? Have you ever been a member of a fascist organisation? Your father was a Nazi, wasn’t he? How have you sought to infect those in the East?’ But there’s no invective in his manner, and he doesn’t seem to expect any answer; there’s only the sense that they’re both simply biding time or playing a game. Round and round on an endless carousel.

  Then, she’s back in the cell: 102. LIE ON YOUR BACK! STAND UP! LIE DOWN! Bark, bark, crash, bang.

  Karin’s face is ever present as Jutta stares at the grimy ceiling – her sister’s horrified, helpless reaction as she was dragged into the Barkas outside the Presse. Karin’s words, her fears when they were first reunited, cartwheel in Jutta’s tired mind: ‘I can’t chance being caught, Ja-Ja. It frightens me to the core.’ The Stasi wear everyone down in the end, Karin warned her then: ‘Everyone.’ Now, Jutta would give anything for her other half to be nearby, but please, please not in a cell. Not here, in this alternate hell.

  It’s hard to even cry, as the tears squat in her eyes and she’s afraid to turn her head sideways and let them fall freely, for fear of being shouted at. Eventually, though, they brim to breaking point and roll down her face, snaking into her ears so that even the sound of her own sobbing is distorted, like everything else.

  The same again. And again. There’s no breakfast or dinner – just one standard meal, pushed through the hatch, with metallic-tasting water or gritty, tepid coffee. Jutta sees no one apart from the guards’ shoes and partial faces, and Herr Brown, as she’s begun to call him.

  He stops asking and begins suggesting, although Jutta recalls enough of the Stasi technique to know that this is their speciality: never to use violence, but to employ the long game, to hint and cultivate doubt in the prisoner’s vacuum. To erode her own soul. Herr Brown begins, slowly, to dripfeed the names of those who might have betrayed her – Axel is among them, so too Hugo, and Otto. Even Gerda and Oskar. Oskar, he tells her quite jovially, is well known in the East, a supplier of goods to the complex at Wandlitz, their leader Walter Ulbricht among the recipients. This knowledge that Oskar harbours means that he owes them favours. A lot of favours, Herr Brown reiterates darkly. There’s mention of Karin and Ruth as the culprits, which Jutta dismisses in a heartbeat, and a few names from her library department, sure to be a bluff as they know nothing of the portal. But someone did. Someone betrayed her.

  Then, Herr Brown begins suggesting. The words are mildly threatening, though his unwavering, steady tone doesn’t falter. He mentions a castle in Saxony, though at first Jutta can’t understand why he’s talking of the beautiful scenery in East Germany.

  ‘It’s perhaps not your traditional castle,’ Herr Brown adds drily, ‘but it does do very well as a women’s prison. Lots of space for inmates and very secure. It’s where we send those guilty of espionage.’

  She laughs then – she can’t help it, a dry throaty cackle born of pure disbelief. ‘I’m not a spy,’ Jutta croaks, in the longest string of words she’s uttered for an age. ‘I was only seeing my sister.’

  ‘You’re from the West and you went through to the East, secretly and illegally,’ he prickles. ‘Of course you were spying.’ Still, there’s no malice, and he says it as if it’s already proven and she is convicted. Perhaps she is.

  On her next outing, she is pulled from her cell and a half-sleep to a similar office adjoined to another by a window-sized hole in the wall, a metal grille separating the two. Jutta is told to sit by the grille, looking into the next-door office, with its regulation brown furniture and a typewriter as well as a phone. A different man, in grey this time, arrives. He sits upright behind the desk and tells her she is charged with espionage against the German Democratic Republic, and several counts of ‘border violations’. He mutters something about life imprisonment, but Jutta is entirely distracted by the window’s metal bars, wondering if they will notice her resting her head and stealing a minute’s sleep. There’s dread, mingling with disbelief and the words floating over her, but mostly she just wants to close her eyes and drift.

  Then it’s back to her dates with Herr Brown. Once, he offers her a cigarette, which she takes warily, but only because he’s smoking from the same pack. On top of an empty stomach, it makes her light-headed. Even so, she thinks it’s a kind gesture. Herr Brown is nothing if not civil under his flat, slightly disinterested air. As he rambles, she ponders where he lives, what sort of wife he goes home to at night, and whether this is just a job, or if he actually enjoys it. How
he explains to his children what it is that he does, every day at work.

  At their next meeting, she’s angry – livid at being plucked from an endless nightmare of waking in what feels like the small hours. She sits hunched on her silly stool and scowls. Herr Brown doesn’t flinch, just carries on droning. This time there’s a guard behind her, who prods her in the back when she drifts off as Herr Brown is speaking. She wants to spit at the guard and claw his eyes out, so he will leave her alone to sag and sleep, she doesn’t care where. Just to sleep, perchance to dream. Who said that? Is it someone I know?

  66

  Thoughts

  Sometime in November, Somewhere in East Germany

  There are four bricks across and seven down in the window – that’s twenty-eight in total. I’ve counted them over and over. What is twenty-eight? Not my age, not yet. Will I even reach it? Days in February, that’s it. That’s Hugo’s birthday too. Hugo. Could he have told them? He knew, maybe he was threatened – his job that he loves. No, he wouldn’t. Would he? There’s Oskar too – his odd behaviour, a black-market trader to the East elite. Poor Gerda. Someone knew I was there, with Karin. Right there. Erich? Then why would he defend me, go and get himself shot? Who else knew? Walter? They haven’t mentioned him. He’s a doctor, they might have threatened to take away his position, force him into farm work – they can do that, can’t they? And he loves Karin, wants her to stay in the East. Maybe at all costs. Otto too – he might be more loyal than Karin knows, a member of the Party, one of them. A Stasi man. Karin said it herself – they’re everywhere. Was that a warning? Did she mean me to stay away, does she mean it’s her? It’s not grumpy Frau Lupke who’s their block informer but her, the pretty flighty girl from the West being blackmailed. So many times Karin could have come home. And yet she didn’t. Why? Is she just pretending? Now one of them? Enough to give up her own sister. No. Surely, not Karin. Not my Karin. Not to her Ja-Ja. But she might, for her own freedom with Otto. She just might. But then there’s our thread. I know it’s there. I can feel it. Can I? Really? Or is that me dreaming, wanting it too much?