The Girl Behind the Wall

by Mandy Robotham

  ‘Yes, too cold out for me,’ Jutta chirps.

  They turn to leave, and startle uncontrollably – the Vopo is behind them, tucked inside the shop doorway. He smiles, though, and nods approvingly at Jutta’s purchase.

  ‘Let’s not hang around now,’ Danny says as they reach the pavement outside. ‘We’ll just go regardless.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I might be wrong but I think that Vopo spotted my collar buttons,’ he says, fingering the star-shaped metal pins and pushing them out of sight, perhaps too late. ‘Damn it, I should have taken them off.’

  Jutta’s instinct has always been to tiptoe towards the portal, but this time she strides with false confidence into the maze of dirt alleys; it feels like an age since she was last here and she still has no idea how long it’s been, or what day it is. It’s quiet, with nobody about, and she pulls Danny in her wake – one more left and right turn to go. Will the stone blocks be there to hoist them into the window? At least they have each other to lift and pull up.

  ‘Hallo … hallo?’ An echoey voice is a little way behind them, enquiring, though they can each guess who it is, military boots splitting the gravel underfoot with the heavy trudge of a march. They freeze instinctively, Danny flattening them both into the side of a wooden building under the eaves of a roof.

  ‘Hallo, are you there?’ Still friendly, but not to be put off. Now two sets of boots, mutterings evident between colleagues. The steps quicken, followed by a distinct click as weapons are cocked ready.

  Jutta’s eyes widen into Danny’s: what to do? To bluff it out so near to the Wall, certain to be suspicious, or to scuttle silently towards the opening? Will they make it?

  Danny reads her thoughts and the hand sign she makes – it’s left then right – and nods. They push off as the two Vopos round the corner, their fierce cries signalling complete and utter dread.

  ‘HALT! HALT! WE’LL SHOOT!’

  They do – the initial shot ricocheting off the wall of the first turn, the second thudding into wood.

  ‘Keep going!’ Danny yells, as if they have any choice, and Jutta’s too-big shoes flap around against her soles, slowing her up. She can hear the Vopos scrabbling behind them now, rounding the last corner at speed, and life goes into slow motion all over again as Danny pulls out a gun from inside his jacket, turning and aiming it towards the two grey uniforms. Only she sees his hand shake as he points the weapon directly at them, but the two young boys shrink back, their youth and fear overcoming any bravery in the face of a barrel.

  Seconds, or more? What is time to Jutta after the past days? The brief respite gives her the chance to reach the blocks, thanking providence the pile is still there. She yanks open the window and vaults into the space, landing on the boxes on the other side, turning and shouting, ‘Here! Here!’ at Danny, as he sprays two shots into the air to create more time.

  In the next moment, she’s hanging from the window and, with strength that comes from nowhere, hauls Danny’s arm up and through the portal. They tumble from the stacked boxes and land in a combined heap on the floor, and Jutta feels her ankle crack on contact. One frantic look traded and they’re both upright, Jutta’s foot searing with pain, though the sight of a Vopo face at the window overrides the agony. They glance at shoulders being hoisted through the window space; until she and Danny are through the tarpaulin they remain on the East side of the Wall. Still targets.

  Biting against the pain of her ankle, Jutta takes the lead through the corridor, crashing into the doors with enough force that the glass is ejected and smashes behind them, mixed with a cinematic ping as more bullets bounce off discarded metal. These Vopo boys are determined now on their glory of nabbing Wall-jumpers, and keen to avoid the punishment if they don’t.

  Danny is a hair’s breadth in Jutta’s wake as she half-runs half-limps into the kitchen. With the Vopos seconds away, Jutta squats instinctively behind the old sofa, jerking Danny down. Their lungs sting with fearsome breath as the soldiers clatter into the empty room.

  ‘Shit! Where did they go?’ one says in a panic.

  ‘They must be here, there’s nowhere else. Two rooms over there. Quick!’

  Footsteps circle and then recede, though only to the adjoining room – one pair of boots thumps up the stairs. Without thinking, Jutta seizes the moment, kicks off her shoes and hobbles to the cabinet, lifting it with stealth to avoid any scrape and judging the space big enough to fit Danny’s frame. He creeps from behind the sofa and she kneels down, feels his hands guide her hips as her face touches the tarpaulin with utter relief, the diver breaking the surface to suck in the precious air of the West.

  On the pavement, Jutta scrabbles up and turns to see Danny’s dark crown push through into freedom, then shouts from beyond the tarpaulin: ‘Hey Hans! Here they are!’

  A single shot follows, with Danny crying out in sudden agony. His head jerks, torso half in and half out, and his body slumps. Jutta heaves at his shoulders frantically, her ankle instantly numb but every other muscle screaming with the effort, and inside a voice pushes her on: ‘Just one last time, one last time through.’ It feels an age until the sudden release of his deadened legs, she not stopping until his entire frame is pulled clear and is present in the West, along with a red river of blood seeping alongside the grey granite of the Wall.

  Inside the ambulance, Jutta wills Danny’s blue, blue eyes to open, but the smile she knows so well remains absent, his features slack. The pool of crimson creeps upwards from his foot and soaks through the bandages, while Jutta hears the medic muttering to the other about a big loss of blood and ‘hitting an artery’. The siren screams through the streets of West Berlin and her own voice croaks: ‘Stay with me, Danny. Please. Stay with me.’

  PART FOUR

  68

  The Divide in Decline

  11th November 1989, Friedrichstrasse Station – West Side

  There is a discernible but low hum of expectation as Jutta cranes her neck to scan above the heads under the bright station lights. Brown, black, ginger and grey strands form a mobile wave of human hair. Hearts are on hold, tears held in abeyance, and Jutta’s own, labile emotions match the general anticipation; excited, reticent, up, down, happiness mixed with a deep-seated sadness at so much time lost.

  Time is a healer, so the saying goes. But Jutta has long since decided that it’s more of a bandage – it can stop the bleeding, but the wound remains underneath, sore and scarred. Time, too, creates history, and plenty has occurred since her own wounding: in two and a half decades men have walked on the moon, girls driven to frenzy amid Beatlemania, JFK has fallen to a bullet, his brother too, and Martin Luther King lost to hatred. The world has endured Vietnam and famine, celebrated Band-Aid, Bowie and punk. Countries and governments have been created and destroyed, wars fought and lost.

  In Berlin, the Wall has morphed over the years – stronger, higher and more fortified, rebuilt to repel more efficiently, with dogs, death strips and mines. The escapees, in turn, became more creative, using ever more daring tunnels as their conduit: the tiniest of bubble cars, hot-air balloons and even a fake, life-size cow; their determination never quashed.

  More recently, and crucially, the Iron Curtain has shown its weakness, fading and fraying to sprout holes, with freedom-seekers picking at the fabric. And the holes became bigger, first at the borders with Hungary and Czechoslovakia, now in Germany itself. Communism is chipped and cracked, its own fissure unable to be cemented. Finally, the Wall is surmountable.

  Which is why Jutta is here now, two days after those incredible scenes were broadcast to the world, people stopping and gawping through windows of electrical shops globally, surprised and smiling; the image of thousands scrambling up and over the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, a convoy of comical Trabants hooting in a crazy symphony as they tootled over the border, and the hacking at the concrete as the GDR finally acquiesces and admits the Wall can no longer stand firm.

  Heart in her mouth, Jutta had picked up the rece
iver and booked a ticket immediately, was on a plane the very next day.

  Now, Danny squeezes her hand, kisses the side of her hair and whispers, ‘All right?’

  She pulls up her bottom lip, thinking that if she speaks, tears might ooze through the rift in her tight-knit resolve. The truth is, she doesn’t know. How can she? Somewhere, in a throng on the other side of the platform, her twin sister will soon arrive, a full twenty-six years older. Greyer, probably, since Jutta needs to reach for the hair dye more often these days. How will her twin sister look? Will she be hardened by a life spent longer in the GDR than in the West, or will Karin’s soft inner core have survived the future she chose?

  Jutta feels her own life, by comparison, has been blessed. She still asks herself why, out of the two, she was the one chosen by fate to be on the West side, to have dodged the spectral shadow of the Wall, by a whole series of coincidences, dares and strokes of fortune. Why she was the one allowed to flee and be free.

  And they did take flight quickly, once the injury to Danny’s foot had been patched, the Vopo bullet ripping through his heel as he disappeared like a creature in a burrow. Barely out of surgery to repair the shattered bone, he’d faced up to the wrath of his uncle, the real Colonel Strachan; the fury of the senior American army man had been white-hot, not only at Danny’s insubordination but also at the danger incurred by such a reckless plan. The injury, which still causes Danny to limp a little in the cold weather, proved to be a saving grace for him; a potential international incident was buried as an embarrassment by the East, the Allies in turn needing to showboat their gratitude for saving the life and liberty of a West Berliner. In the end, Lieutenant Strachan’s reward was a quiet and honourable discharge from the US army and the chance to pursue his long-held dream of academia. Jutta fled with him, her own future in West Berlin judged as perilous with the Stasi lurking, prompted also by Danny’s proposal of marriage from his hospital bed, which they still laugh about now.

  They headed for New York and Columbia, with Danny sinking back into his own blissful past and working towards his professorship in history, buried in his beloved, ancient tomes.

  Jutta never quite managed to be the archetypal professor’s wife, instead gaining a PhD in modern languages and a student faculty of her own on the campus in Munich, where after fifteen years at Columbia they relocated as a family, and from where they’re able to check regularly on Ruth and Gerda. The two older sisters are in their seventies now, and waiting tentatively at home in Schöneberg, with Hugo, his wife Lottie and their three children, for a full family celebration.

  Jutta’s children, Livvy and Thomas – native New Yorkers and Germans at heart – are old enough now to have flown the coop, with Livvy choosing to sample the edgy underbelly of West Berlin, and to stay for the time being. Jutta reasons she’s probably high up on a section of Wall at this moment, raising a fist in defiance and clutching her own slab of history. Little does she know how much of her own past is set in that concrete.

  There’s only one piece of Jutta’s self, her heart and her life jigsaw that is missing, now just metres away. Soon to be in sight, palpable, and within arm’s reach.

  69

  Scaling the Divide

  11th November 1989, Friedrichstrasse Station – East Side

  ‘Next stop Friedrichstrasse station,’ the Tannoy announces, and a cheer goes up through the carriage as the U-Bahn prepares to stop in what was known to Berliners as ‘The Palace of Tears’, an underground border divide designed to split families from East to West across a dreary platform. For decades, it sought to separate. But not today.

  Otto looks at Karin and nods, eyes wide with true delight; he’s aged well, she thinks constantly, with his boyish looks intact and blond hair a little thinner but not balding. The faint lines around his eyes make him even more attractive. No wonder she fell in love with him, no mystery that she stayed.

  It’s Karin’s first time in the West since that day when she ghosted through to see Mama and Gerda all those years ago, and she wonders how much of this Berlin she will recognise, if the pace and its modernity will unsettle her. Even the East side of the city feels slightly alien these days, she and Otto having spent most of the last twenty-six years in Leipzig, only returning recently to live in Berlin again.

  A forced move was their punishment, of sorts, a kind of banishment the GDR liked to press upon its valued but wayward citizens. Typical of Otto that he saw it as more of a challenge, in working to rebuild the oft-forgotten war-torn ruins of Leipzig.

  On that day when her sister was netted in front of her eyes outside the Presse Café to a potentially horrific fate, that poor boy Vopo gunned down in cold blood, Karin received her expected visit from the Stasi. But not before she’d managed to run to the only person sure to help then, the one who had the means and position to get a message across to Danny in the West; Walter, her constant, her father-figure to this day, a surrogate grandfather to her children. Then she was scooped up (much to Frau Lupke’s joy), along with Otto.

  Individually, they were interrogated, warned, threatened and sleep-deprived – for the umpteenth time Karin was split several ways: worry over Jutta, fear at never seeing Otto again, the growing baby inside her belly.

  They couldn’t squeeze out of Otto what was never there in the first place – having never known details of the portal – and so they were both freed, with the inevitable conditions, though Otto somehow resisted becoming an informant. Later, in safety, he admitted to suspecting something of Karin’s double life, since spying the ‘borrowed’ watch on her wrist and detecting a change in her. He was never certain enough to confront her, but he laid plans all the same with the people he knew, those few in the GDR with power and humanity combined. So that when he needed it most, he called in the biggest of favours. For Karin, the woman he loved. In the relative security of their own bed, he confessed the rest in whispers: his fears that Karin had got herself ‘into some sort of trouble’, and his attempts to protect her, using Erich as his eyes. Otto admitted then to knowing Erich from school, and of his boyhood friend’s antipathy towards the regime, jaded by what he saw from inside his uniform. ‘I wasn’t spying, I promise,’ Otto told his wife. ‘I just didn’t want to lose you in the worst way possible. I wanted to warn you if I could.’

  The rest, he could only gather, was pure coincidence, coupled with Erich’s own desperation to flee East Germany, along with his family, a reckless valour for the freedom he truly believed in. Though sadly fatal.

  So, for the sake of their growing child, Astrid, and a second daughter, Sabine, the Krugers lived a model GDR life, providing for others and raising their children, never giving the Stasi cause to doubt. It was the only way they could survive, gratified to escape the horrors of a long imprisonment.

  To any outsider it looked as though Otto upheld the ideals for several years, and only Karin was close enough to see that his former beliefs had been crushed by imprisonment and the ongoing regime. For years, they simply maintained the façade. But when the dissident demonstrations against the regime brewed first in Leipzig throughout 1989, Otto was there, watching and waiting on the periphery, not sorry then that his home country would be forced to implode, the GDR to admit that their utopia finally proved unworkable. Proudly, they were both in the crowd of 70,000 protesters marching through the streets of their adopted city on October 9th, as the first virtual block of the GDR was felled, followed a month later by the Wall itself.

  Karin knows that Otto is nervous about adapting to new beginnings and a wider world, but they can start small; she can show him the joys of her Berlin, the city as a whole. Their city.

  As for her sister, Karin received scant word of the prison release and then escape to the US - enough to allow her to breathe again. There were pictures permitted over the years as the Stasi stranglehold loosened and the blacklist became old and dog-eared. She’s fingered the photographs of Jutta’s growing children more times than she can remember, hardly hoping to ever meet them
in the flesh. Mama and Gerda were consistently denied the Christmas passes afforded to many West Berliners, but in recent years the two women have been permitted to visit Leipzig once or twice, though the journey is long and arduous for them. Karin was forbidden to attend Oskar’s funeral in 1970, his body found sodden with alcohol in the Spree; no foul play suspected and no suicide note, though the family don’t speak about why or how, for Hugo and Gerda’s sake. Still, Karin suspects her uncle died of guilt, and that her aunt shoulders that burden now.

  Now, she’s fizzing with excitement at the thought of being back home, in the apartment, seeing Hugo and his children, her own daughters meeting their cousins for the first time.

  Does she have any regrets? Only that it’s taken so long for the world to wake up and act, for those in power to stand back and realise the ridiculous nature of splitting a vibrant, functioning city in two, slicing the fabric of families, causing pain and mistrust. But when she looks at her husband and her beautiful children, no. No regrets. And now Jutta. Karin daren’t imagine the first touch, the words they will exchange, destined to be drowned in tears, no doubt. The train is slowing and coming to a stop, and Karin’s heart is gathering speed, making up for the twenty-six lost years since one small slice of it has lain dormant.

  70

  Together

  11th November 1989, Berlin

  The crowd ripples with expectation as the doors slide open and bodies flood onto the platform, a few families linking immediately and their cries of joy lifting above the throng.

  ‘Come on.’ Danny pulls Jutta forward, weaving through the people and searching faces as they jostle, scanning for likeness in the eyes of those they once knew so intimately.

  He stops short. Of course, he’ll recognise Karin – her double is right beside him every day, in his bed every night. Her hair and dress are different, but the features identical. And the spirit within. He pulls on Jutta’s hand, gently pushing her forward to where a woman and a man stand, arm in arm.