Berlin Letters, page 29
I minutely shake my head and keep walking toward the guards.
“Beck, I need to speak to you.” My German carries a bravado to signal I know what I’m doing and know who will answer me. Shouting my command from a few feet away forces Beck to step toward me. I tuck my hands in my coat pocket to keep their shaking from giving me away.
I stall and Beck closes the distance between us, making it so the guard left standing behind him can’t quite hear. Not that he could regardless. The train engines are ramping up.
“I want Haris Voekler.” My voice carries such confidence my eyes widen in surprise. I tilt my head toward the line of men to hide my expression. I also straighten myself to my full five-foot-seven-inch frame. After all, in the movies moxie means more than size every time.
“What are you offering for your Haris Voekler?” The guard’s voice is low, oily, and I silently thank Helene. If I’d had my way, I wouldn’t have any money tucked down my shirt for this moment. I dismiss the two thousand in my tights immediately. I need to wow this guard and, I sense, there will be no second chance to do so.
“Ten thousand US dollars. Cold. Hard. Cash.”
Now Beck’s eyes widen. He glances to the train. “Here? Now?”
“It’s now or never.”
He looks back to the other guard, and I use the moment to pull Helene’s pouch from inside my blouse. I want him to see the money. I want him to be so enthralled by it he can’t say no.
He turns back just as I’m opening the pouch. His lips part, his tongue runs over his lower one, and he reaches for it, his hand covering it and tucking the money back inside the pouch. He slides the whole thing from around my neck, out of my hands, and into his pocket in a single fluid motion.
“One hour.”
I reach for his arm as he turns away. “What do you mean one hour?”
The other guard calls his name and he steps back, his eyes still fixed on mine. “We need to board the prisoners now. One can get lost and it may take a full hour before we notice. After that, we must report it and begin the search.”
He doesn’t let me protest or reply. He turns and walks to the line of grey men. They stand at his call, and while the other guard leads the line to the train, Beck stands back to follow at the rear.
The other guard gives me a cursory glance as he walks by but doesn’t break his stride. He climbs the three steps onto the train and the prisoners follow until, at the last moment, Beck yanks my father from the line and pushes him toward me.
I don’t wait to be told anything else. I grab his sleeve and dive into the press of people still waiting to board the train at the next door.
“How are you here?” he calls above the noise. In English. “You are Luisa, yes?”
It makes me smile. Does he think, considering where I’ve grown up, that I don’t speak German?
I stop and reply in German. “Ja. But we don’t have time to talk now. We only have one hour before they’ll start searching for you.”
He’s smiling at me. It’s broad and joyful, as if he didn’t hear a word I said or maybe as if he only heard my yes. My breathing skips pace. It’s a wonderful, beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime type of smile.
“Luisa.” He sighs. “Maüschen.”
“Yes,” I say the word again. Then I yank his arm again. We have to move.
“Luisa?” he calls, and I stop at the panicked note I hear within his voice. He lifts his chin to my neck. “Your scarf.” He wiggles his hands slightly between us. His sleeves tip back and I see the glimmer of handcuffs. I pull off my scarf, wrap his hands within in it, and grip his sleeve once more.
“We’ve got to get as far away as possible.”
“I have friends who will hide us.”
“Peter and Helene?” I slow as the crowds press us near the stairwell.
“Nein,” my father barks. His hands fumble from beneath the scarf as he tries to grip my arm. “You have met them? They know you are here? What do they know?”
We climb the stairs side by side. We’re both speaking German and hopefully blending into the crowd around us. “They helped me this morning, but they know nothing. They knew about my first contact, but that all went wrong.”
“They probably made it wrong.”
I stop. “I wondered about that.”
A man bumps us from behind and my father shakes his head to signal silence and says, “Later,” so softly I barely catch it. I nod and start us climbing again. We reach the top of the stairs, descend the second set from the platform to the street, and pour out onto the sidewalk along with all the other people leaving the station.
“There are others we can trust.” He points down the street. “We must get to the Church of Zion. We will need papers and can print them there.”
I follow his gesture and step in front of him, trying to clear a path in the direction he wants us to go. But within seconds, I know it won’t work. I look to my father and see he senses it too. Our way is blocked. Not by a barricade or anything official, but by a wall of people surging into the streets and all of them walking toward us rather than the direction we want to go. We can’t make any progress.
It’s the strangest crowd too. It’s not excited or angry. It carries with it a timid jubilance, almost wonder. People greet each other as if they’ve woken from some collective dream and are trying to discover if the other person remembers it too and has done the same. No one says stuff like that; it simply feels like that.
I step in front of my father so he can use both hands to grip my coat from behind. Because no matter what this is or where these people are going, we still need papers and our time is ticking away.
Five steps and we get pulled apart by people pushing around and through us. They’re not trying to; it’s just that the sidewalks are so packed, we’re all crashing into each other. I turn, lunge for my father, and again grasp his sleeve. The crowds have spilled into the street as well. Cars are moving at a snail’s pace, but drivers aren’t honking in annoyance. Again, a strange, almost silent thrum carries everyone along.
“We’re not getting anywhere.” He pulls at his hands, which drags me with them, and we step aside. Pressed against a building, we let people swarm by us.
A man stops and pounds his hand onto my father’s shoulder. “Don’t look so glum. Come on. It’s open.”
“Open?” my father asks, but the man is gone.
Standing with our backs against the building, we finally listen and examine what’s going on around us. Some people are crying, but not out of anguish. Tears run down their cheeks and get lost within smiles and laughter. The chatter is starting to rise, hitting a new emotional note. The crowd’s demeanor is changing right before our eyes. Most are beginning to talk in excited voices, saying words I can’t fully grasp, and their eyes are wide with disbelief. The crowd’s buoyant energy seems to intensify even in the short time we stand studying it.
I face my father. “They say the Wall is open. That’s what they’re saying.”
He rolls the back of his head against the brick as if trying to knead reality into his brain. “Don’t believe them, Luisa. Honecker would never allow it. It’s impossible. We must go. We’ll need papers to get out. We need a plan.” He looks to me. “Do you have a plan?”
“Honecker was ousted. Last month. Egon Krenz is general secretary now.”
My father pales from grey to bone-chilling white. I grip his arm, worried he’s having a heart attack or something. I berate myself for surprising him. I should have kept my mouth shut.
“We need a plan. We still need a plan.” He repeats the sentences like they are lifelines.
“I have a phone number that will become a plan, I promise. We just need a secure telephone.”
My father’s hopeless expression makes him look frail and vulnerable to me, even more so than when I first noted him sitting on the bench in the train station. He wants to hope but can’t, and I fear that if we fail it’ll destroy him.
I push against the crowd, holding fast to him, and start again. Panzer’s phone is the only safe one I know about. Any pay-phone line could be bugged.
We press on in the same direction we’ve been heading, and it takes an inordinate amount of time to travel even one block. I sense our hour is almost gone, if it’s not gone already.
“You’re going the wrong way.” A young woman smiles at us. “Turn. Come on.”
“Why?” My father stops. It feels like he’s challenging her to repeat the same lie we’ve heard again and again.
“They’re opening the Wall. It’s over.”
Now I’m shaking my head too. It can’t be true. After all, in January of this year, GDR head of state Erich Honecker declared the Wall would stand for fifty or a hundred years more if the West was, well, still the West. Although Honecker is not in power any longer, Egon Krenz hasn’t done or said anything to defy that. Loosened travel restrictions, yes, but papers are still required. Bringing down the Wall? I’m as hesitant to believe as my father.
“It’s true.” The young woman is practically laughing at our befuddlement. “They announced it on television at a press conference tonight. The border is fully open.”
My father and I exchange a glance. Only knowing him for a minute, I’m surprised at all that can be said between us in a single glance. Yes? No? Finally, we both accept we must simply give up trying to struggle against the tide. Either they are right and we are going to be fine, or they are wrong and we end up no worse than we are right now. Our hour is gone, and at this rate, we’ll never reach Panzer’s apartment.
We let the crowd push us west.
The crowd grows to a massive size at Bornholmer Strasse. Everyone is talking about Politburo member Günter Schabowski’s statement.
“He did not look like he knew what he was saying.”
“But he said it.”
“It’s all around the world. They can’t take that back.”
Words bounce around us like pinballs in a machine. Everyone is saying the same thing over and over as if trying to convince themselves it’s true, that the barricades are down, that the Wall is effectively no more, and that they are free.
I glance over at my father. The streetlights catch tears streaming down his face. I say nothing, as I don’t sense he fears getting caught anymore. I sense he believes them.
* * *
Haris Voekler
7:36 p.m.
I notice the young woman, and at first I think I am seeing a ghost, I am dying as I deserve, and Monica has come to haunt me. But then it comes with a flash. I tamp it down and yet I can’t stop it from escaping: “Mäuschen?”
It was my name for Luisa. Only mine at first. I asked Walther once to continue it, hoping in some small way she might remember me, but I’m not sure he did or, if so, that he’s used it in recent years. It may be a memory of a dream I alone carry, because there is nothing small or mouselike about the beautiful woman who glances my direction.
My eyes widen as if I’m looking into a mirror. Hers do as well—she is real and she knows. My heart stops, then starts beating double-time, triple-time. I no longer worry about hallucinations; I fear a heart attack.
I want to reach out. One touch. But she keeps walking forward. I want to stop her. She cannot understand what these men are capable of. But I sit still. I am ashamed. I am ashamed of my weakness, my impotence. I am ashamed that I am here, that I am chained, and that she is here and has seen me like this.
She speaks. Officer Beck sees her now too, and I worry for her. It takes me a few gulps of air, as I haven’t eaten well for months and I’ve only just recovered from a rough bronchial infection, to realize that I can’t stop whatever is about to happen. It’s real and it might harm my daughter. I repeat this to myself, as my head has been so full of the hallucinations of the sleep deprived, I sometimes wander the thin line between reality and my dreams.
The young woman . . . Luisa? Is it possible? . . . She walks with purposeful confidence. Her stride is long. She must be Luisa. She is not Monica. She moves nothing like my wife did. There is something unique in the carriage of this woman, the way she strikes out on the ball of each foot, the way she carries her head high.
Beck speaks to her and, after a few moments, returns to load us onto the train. The woman stands to the side as Wagner yells for us to embark, and Beck circles around to flank our rear. Just as I’m about to step forward onto the stairs, there is a jostling in the line ahead and Beck pushes me aside.
The woman grabs my sleeve and pulls me into the press of people still waiting to board the train a few feet distant at its first-class compartment.
“How are you here?” I shout in English. I feel my voice give way. It’s not strong enough yet. I’m getting so little air. Walther wrote they only spoke to Luisa in English as she was growing up. They wanted her to fit in. They even hoped she might forget her life here. I couldn’t blame them and I never wrote how sad it made me, because she deserved the gift and freedom to forget.
When she doesn’t answer, I call out again, “You are Luisa, yes?”
She stops and turns back. “Ja. But we don’t have time to talk now. We only have one hour before they’ll start searching for you.” Her German is flawless. It carries a little of Gertrude’s eastern notes. I almost laugh as it seems Gertrude wasn’t as resolute in Walther’s forgetfulness campaign as he assumed.
I smile. It feels light and bright, unfamiliar, and a little painful on the edges. I don’t remember the last time I smiled. My cheeks are unused to the stretch. But it grows and grows to the point I think my whole face fills with it.
She hiccups, almost as if she, too, has suffered bronchitis and can’t fill her lungs with air.
“Luisa.” I simply want to say her name again. “Maüschen.”
“Yes.” She nods in a stiff, decisive motion, and once again I am reminded of my mother-in-law. Before I can comment or laugh about it, she tugs at my arm and sets off through the crowds at a pace I can barely meet.
“Luisa?” I muster enough air and energy to call again. When running, my handcuffs rattle and can be seen as my shirt cuffs pull back. It’s only a matter of time, seconds even, before someone notices and reports us. We are rule-followers; we are a fearful people.
She stops and turns, but I don’t have enough air to speak again. I lift my chin to her neck. Her eyes flicker with question and I croak, “Your scarf.” I shift my hands between us. Her gaze drops and she understands. She pulls off her scarf, wraps my hands within it, and starts off again, pulling me along by my sleeve. “We’ve got to get as far away as possible.”
We are side by side now. “I have friends who will hide us.”
“Peter and Helene?”
We slow with the pace of the crowd as we all climb the stairs to street level.
“Nein.” My voice breaks. Panic seizes me. How can she know about the Sauers? What have they done? I struggle to free my hands from the scarf. I need to touch my daughter, make sure she’s okay, and make sure she hears me. “You have met them? They know you are here? What do they know?”
We climb the stairs side by side and the people pass around us. I can’t keep pace. She continues to speak in German and that is best. English would get us noticed, especially with how close the crowd presses. I do not remember any street, station, or stairwell ever being so busy.
“They helped me this morning, but they know nothing. They knew about my first contact, but that all went wrong.”
“They probably made it wrong.”
“I wondered about that.” She stops and a man bumps us from behind. He swears at her and moves around us. I shake my head, murmuring, “Later.” We cannot talk here.
We reach the top of the stairs and, like pressure released from a clogged valve, spew onto the platform of the elevated trains. Luisa pulls me to the stairs and we descend, this time even more slowly, as I’m having trouble with all the chaos around me. My cell was a much quieter place and my brain doesn’t adapt well.
I expect relief when we reach the sidewalk and are out in the open, but none comes. The sidewalks are crowded. Too crowded for nighttime. Are they here for the protests the man in the next cell mentioned? What’s happening, and how much have I missed in the last six months? I wonder about the protests in Leipzig. I wonder about the elections and if the Party was able to sweep it all under the rug. I wonder what General Secretary Honecker stated about the uprisings across Europe or even about the horrific revolt in Tiananmen Square in China that we heard whisperings of within the prison walls.
I shake my head. It is heavy and fuzzy, but I must stay focused. “There are others we can trust,” I say, gesturing with my bound hands down the street. “We must get to the Church of Zion. We will need papers and can print them there.”
I pivot to the east and she follows. Then, within a step, she steps in front of me to take the lead. She blocks me from the crowds. My daughter protects me. It ignites a battle within me. Pride for who she has become. Shame I am not capable of protecting her. Yet I am not. I am too weak. I can barely keep my weary fingers clasped to the back of her coat.
But it’s not helping. We are making no headway. The crowds are growing by the second, and we get pushed back a half step or more for every step of progress. Something has gone horribly wrong. People must be seeking safety. My first thought is that the Party is locking us in tighter. My second thought is that Soviet tanks are moving in as they did in 1953. My mind casts to the incongruence of that thought as Gorbachev had been promoting reform and peace before I went to prison. But who knows? He could be ousted by now. He could have been replaced by someone more of Honecker’s ilk. Anything could have happened and I would not know.
My city suddenly feels foreign and frightening to me.
The crowd separates us and I try to cry out, but my lungs flare and I end up coughing. I feel myself stumble back and fear I will fall and be crushed by the crowd. But I see her . . .
A hand yanks me upright. Quite strong, my little mouse.
“We’re not getting anywhere.” She looks around frantically. I want to push her away, tell her to save herself. If we only had an hour, then seeing her was worth it and I will go back to prison a happy man. But she must not get caught with me. She must go free.
