The Wall Between Read online

  He could no longer see her, just hear her calling. There was something teasing in her voice, and he was suddenly overwhelmed by doubt. What did she want? He stood hesitantly on the bank, unsure whether to remove his clothes. He was used to observing her, but now the roles were reversed. The bank suddenly seemed like an illuminated stage. In the café he’d been in control of the situation, but now she was in charge. He considered running back to his dormitory, letting her remain in the water, so that he would be the one calling the shots, but she had asked, and only the water covered her now-naked body. He knew what would happen, or at least what he hoped might happen. At the same time, he feared it.

  He pulled his underwear off decisively. The night was dark, and there was only Elisabeth, and he would never have this opportunity again. He walked slowly into the water and started to swim toward her enchanting voice. Only her head was visible above the surface, her long red hair spread around her face. She swam to meet him. The water was cold, but he didn’t notice. She tugged him farther out in the lake and put one arm around his neck. Her breath smelled of sweet champagne. With her other hand, she guided him to one of her breasts. She grew weightless in the water, and the bottom disappeared from under Peter’s toes.

  4

  ANDREAS

  Berlin, October 2006

  It takes a while for Andreas’s eyes to focus. When he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is, it feels like the purest form of freedom. In that split second he is lifted above time and space. When the cellophane-like film on his eyes has faded, he glances around the bedroom. He’s greeted by the same sight that greeted his father every morning for years: a white laminate wardrobe, a rocking chair, an oak commode with a clock radio on top. It’s not the digital kind, but an old model that gives a little click on the hour. He pictures the numbers inside like a small Rolodex keeping track of the time. There’s no radio signal from a transmitter near Frankfurt, just a simple belief that one minute takes the time it takes. It’s a stable, functioning clock that faithfully slides through the seconds, minutes, and hours. He lies there waiting patiently for the small, chunky hands to display ten o’clock. It’s a strange, infantile anticipation. Of course he knows what’s going to happen, and it’s nothing special, and yet he’s looking forward to it. It clicks, and he feels a pang of disappointment. The clock turned during the brief moment he was inattentive. He smiles at himself: Andreas Jeppesen, a thirty-year-old graduate student with a tendency to the childish.

  Then he recalls that time in Thorkild’s car. They were on their way home, and the entire car reeked of their catch—garfish that they reeled in off the bridge near his hometown of Frederikssund, the Danish market town thirty miles northwest of Copenhagen. The stench in the trunk was thick, almost gaggingly so, but they didn’t care. Thorkild took a detour with one goal in mind, and just beyond Stenløse it happened: the Ford’s odometer topped one hundred thousand miles. They cheered. Thorkild rolled down the window and shouted. Like a playful pup, he stuck out his tongue, while half his body jutted through the driver’s side window. Andreas looked at his stepfather, and they laughed.

  Thorkild had stopped at a kiosk; this called for a celebration. They read the ice cream poster. The cheapest ones are always on the bottom of the hierarchy, and Andreas learned that one finds the treasures at the top. Hiding in the upper right corner is always the ice cream the adults don’t want to pay for, the ice cream that expands in the belly so that one regrets eating it. Thorkild bought three. One for Andreas, one for himself, and one for the Ford.

  He climbs out of bed. In one of the kitchen drawers, he finds a half-filled coffee can, then pours water into the coffee machine. He snaps it on, and it begins to gurgle. Although he’d never considered it before, he likes the machine’s hoarse, coughing sound. The coffee machine and everything in the apartment is his now. Kurt Donnerwitz from Schultz and Donnerwitz, attorneys-at-law, had informed him in a formal letter that his father had passed away and that he’d willed everything to Andreas. He doesn’t know how the attorney found him, but he recalls the feeling he had when he’d read the letter. Though he had never met Peter, the contents overwhelmed him. He opened a letter and lost his father as suddenly as he read the words. His sadness was followed by an equally crushing sensation: guilt. Andreas had never tried to locate his father. He was afraid of the person he might meet. Elisabeth had told him next to nothing about Peter, but he had detected reluctance in the tone of her spare descriptions of him. Although she never said explicitly that she didn’t care for Peter, her words had transformed into questions for Andreas. What if she was right? What if Andreas didn’t like his own father?

  As a child he’d created an image of his father that the real Peter couldn’t possibly live up to. So he’d retained the fantasy and left well enough alone. He knew that meeting Peter in person would destroy his dreams. He also didn’t want to hurt Thorkild, the man who’d essentially been his father his entire life, and yet Peter’s death came as a shock to him, and Andreas realized that, deep down, he’d held out hope that one day they would meet.

  Now that possibility was gone. Dead at fifty-four years old, Peter can no longer meet anyone, and Andreas feels a black hole of yearning. Though it has always been there, Peter’s death makes it permanent; the hole cannot simply be mended with putty or glue. A murderer, some contemptible person, has eliminated the last shred of hope that father and son might finally meet.

  As the coffee machine gurgles, he gazes out the window. In the backyard he notices a bike shed and, on the roof, a soccer ball that no one can see from below. It’s forgotten and abandoned.

  Shortly afterward, he stands in the doorway to the stairwell, peering out. The rain hasn’t ceased, but it has become gentler and less insistent than the previous evening. He heads into it. At the end of Kopenhagener Strasse is Mauerpark, a sad-looking patch of green once sliced in half by the Wall. Andreas stands in Prenzlauer Berg, a neighborhood that was once part of the Soviet sector; on the other side was Gesundbrunnen, which had been in the French sector. He starts through the park.

  Through the mist, he spots the television tower in the distance. A drunkard is lying on a bench, his knees wrenched up underneath him, and a gaunt German shepherd sniffs loyally around his sleeping master. Mauerpark is anything but welcoming. In a guidebook he’d brought with him from home, he read the following about the park: A recreational area where families with children, joggers, and bookworms make themselves comfortable when the sun is out, but when it rains, the park attracts drug addicts and the homeless. He turns away from the park and heads down Gleimstrasse. The street is littered with hollow chestnut shells that resemble gray’s sedge or tiny battle-axes, and hundreds of shiny chestnuts. He gathers a few and thrusts them in his coat pocket, slowly running his finger across the smooth surface of one. It’s a pleasant feeling, heartening almost. The sand-colored section is rougher, and when he presses his nail against it, he makes a little mark in the chestnut’s soft shell. As he walks, he turns them around and around in his fingers.

  He heads toward Schönhauser Allee, a broad street that passes through Prenzlauer Berg. When he reaches the subway station, which resembles Nørrebro Station in Copenhagen—except that the graffiti is in German—he carefully studies the map of the train lines. The train resembles a sad caterpillar as it comes rattling down the tracks. The doors clatter, then glide open, and people spill onto the platform. In the morning, Berlin is a city teeming with busy people rushing around and avoiding eye contact. They all share the same look of despair, as if the train is moving too slowly toward an important meeting they all seem to be going to. Not wanting to stand out, Andreas simulates busyness by hustling into the coach. When the train pauses between two stations, passengers groan.

  At Ostkreuz he changes to the S7 and immediately notes a shift in the atmosphere. A few stations later, the large apartment blocks begin—one block after another of giant clumps of concrete. It feels as though the city is bleaker out here. The train is dilapidated, and
there’s this composite smell of wood, plastic, and body odor, but everyone seems used to it. It’s a lingering stench, but for the other passengers it’s just part of their daily lives, one of the city’s salient features. He glances around the coach and notices that people are paler here than in Prenzlauer Berg. Even the many dark-skinned riders are pale. He sees women with shawls around their heads speaking a language he doesn’t understand, people wearing clogs, and people carrying shopping bags with faded logos from long-closed grocery store chains.

  He studies a sad-faced girl, who looks to be about eight or nine years old. She stares absentmindedly into space, her school bag weighing down her shoulders. She seems too fragile for these rough surroundings, and he feels an urge to embrace her. Why isn’t anyone looking after you, little friend? It’s dangerous out here. When a large group of young men raise a ruckus in the coach, he grows nervous himself. Although he makes sure to avoid eye contact with them, the girl appears unaffected by their presence. Maybe she’s the one who should be taking care of me.

  They reach the final stop, Ahrensfelde, and he starts walking up Havemannstrasse, the street on which Veronika lives. As far as his eye can see, he’s surrounded by low-income housing. A sense of melancholy is always present. It’s as if someone in a distracted frenzy arranged the buildings too close. They block out the sky, as if they have no interest in letting it in.

  He spots a swastika on a wall. The broad red strokes were clearly painted by an amateur, not an initiate, because the swastika is backward. Drawn in a rush, the paint ran and looks like globules of blood dripping from a butcher’s knife. Seeing it makes him decide that he should return home before dark. That’s when he realizes that he already thinks of Prenzlauer Berg as home. Though he arrived just yesterday, he already prefers Berlin to his hometown.

  Finally he arrives at his destination: a sand-colored building that, like a minor chord, sets the tone for the entire quarter. A long time passes from the moment his finger presses the buzzer until the door emits a soft, humming sound. Walking up the stairs in a state of anticipation, he taps nervously on the railing, which reverberates loudly. He’s embarrassed that he, like some unthinking child, is the cause of the noise. To his relief he sees that the door on the third floor is still closed. He hears shuffling footsteps inside the apartment. Then the door opens, and he does his best to appear relaxed.

  Though he knows that the woman is not yet sixty, she looks old. She has a tired expression in her eyes; her body seems tired, too. She’s wearing a dress and freshly applied makeup, but the makeup doesn’t mask her profound exhaustion.

  “You must be Andreas.” She offers her hand, and her face slowly transforms as she smiles.

  He nods.

  Once he enters the apartment, they stand and study each other for a moment.

  “So you’re my aunt?” Since he’s nervous about his German, he places the emphasis in the wrong spot, and it comes out sounding like a question. This irritates him, because he feels that his German is good; as soon as he arrived in Berlin, the language came back to him, and even though his oral examination was years ago, his durch-für-gegen-ohne-wider-um is lashed securely to his spine.

  Veronika Körber nods indulgently, then invites him into a cramped living room with decorative plates on the walls. They sit beside the coffee table, she in a dark-brown swivel chair made of leather and he on the matching sofa. The furniture is threadbare; his mother would probably call it common. Judging by the way the furniture has carved notches in the rug, it’s clear that it has not moved in years. An old-fashioned TV buzzes like an insect, and he can’t help but notice that it’s tuned to Dallas. The volume is low. JR’s cheeks and white teeth fill the screen before the scene shifts to Miss Ellie’s perpetually tearful face contemplating Sue Ellen, who is intoxicated by lunchtime.

  Veronika’s hands shake slightly when she pours coffee for him from a thermos on the table. A thin bead runs down the side of the thermos and into the joints between the table’s tiles, but she doesn’t notice.

  “Beatrice was the one who read your text. I’m not good at that kind of thing.” Smiling apologetically, she points at an older Nokia cell phone on the table. Kurt Donnerwitz had been kind enough to provide Andreas with the telephone numbers of Peter Körber’s close relatives, and once he’d recovered from reading the attorney’s letter, he had texted Veronika.

  He’s not sure if he should say anything or if he should ask who Beatrice is. He nods and sips his coffee. It’s strong and bitter and no longer hot.

  She lights a cigarette butt, then leans back in her chair, its dry leather creaking beneath her. “You look like your father. Same nose, same mouth. I noticed it as soon as I saw you.” She exhales a thin, gray plume of smoke. “Your hair is thicker than his, but it’s the same color. Have you seen photographs of him?”

  “No.” He’s not sure why he doesn’t mention the photo in the apartment.

  She stands with difficulty, grabs a photo album from the shelf, and sits down next to him. He catches a sour whiff of tobacco. Her dress is frayed, as if it’s been washed too often and the colors have lost their intensity.

  On the TV he hears Bobby Ewing’s deep voice in error-free German, and Andreas suddenly recalls Friday evenings during his childhood. Elisabeth and Thorkild watched Dallas, and he lay on the sofa, swaddled up in his duvet. While his parents laughed at the series, mocking it for revealing everything about capitalism that repulsed them, he asked, “Who is he?”, “Is that her sister?”, “Are those the bad guys?” Elisabeth shushed Thorkild, who patiently explained. On the table were two glasses of red wine and the marzipan bread’s crumpled-up paper. Thorkild wrapped his arm around Andreas, grunting in satisfaction, and he fell asleep to the sound of Bobby Ewing’s voice.

  His father is a child for many pages at the beginning of the photo album; then he’s a teenager and the album ends. She fetches a new album and tells Andreas stories, and he senses the yearning in her voice, which is frequently hesitant and faint. When she comes to one particular photograph, she pauses. They sit for a long moment, staring at the photo as Peter stares back at them. There’s a striking resemblance between him and his father. Andreas has a bigger head and more facial hair. Peter’s skin is smoother, and his hair is straighter.

  A tear drips onto the page, and Veronika’s hand is suddenly on his. Plump, warm fingers seeking consolation, her hand closes around his like a hug. He concentrates on not looking at her. What should he do? What should he say? He understands her grief. Her brother was dramatically taken from her, murdered, and Peter’s own flesh and blood sits beside her. She squeezes his hand, and he tries not to move it. It’s embarrassing, in a way. Peter was his father, but his grief is not as great as hers because he didn’t know the man.

  They riffle through the pages. Peter now appears in uniform. He looks proud, and Andreas asks, “What did my father do?”

  “What do you mean?” She removes her hand and lights another cigarette.

  “What did he do for a living?”

  Suddenly uncertain, she leans forward on the couch. Her dress glides up, and Andreas notices her legs. The varicose veins meander like purple rivers; tributaries flow down her calves, forming a delta just above her socks. A secondary river continues underneath the cotton, where it disappears. Both her skin and her curtains have been discolored by the mentholated cigarettes she smokes, a pack of which now rests on the table. Slowly she tamps out her cigarette. On the edge of the ashtray, a polar bear regards the butt and its glistening wet filter.

  The door opens. Veronika seems relieved. “This is my daughter, Beatrice,” she says proudly.

  A shopping bag overturns in the entranceway. Glass clinks. Plastic crinkles. A subdued voice whispers, “Scheisse.” A young woman appears in the doorway. Though she does nothing in particular, the energy in the room shifts.

  5

  PETER

  East Berlin, July 1976

  Serious-looking men sat in their offices immersed in conversa
tions or bent over stacks of papers that they scrutinized down to the minutest detail. Peter glanced at them while dutifully following a man, who now turned down a different hallway. He’d been summoned to the Ministry for State Security. Peter’s thoughts circled ceaselessly around the impending conversation; he suddenly noticed that his hands were clenched and that his palms were damp. To be promoted and reassigned to the headquarters on Normannenstrasse was a great honor. Only the best were assigned here, the handpicked cream of the crop. Maybe he would soon be on staff in the Ministry for State Security’s Operations Department XX/5.

  Once he arrived at Sonnenberger’s office, the conversation proceeded as he’d hoped, and he’d just completed all of his responses, written in his inelegant right-tilting handwriting. The notebook lay on the table alongside a black Bakelite telephone and a bust of Lenin wearing a cap and a steely gaze. Sonnenberger had known the answers in advance because, even though Peter already was part of the staff, the Ministry for State Security had nonetheless investigated him meticulously. That’s how it operated, and there was something comforting in its scrupulousness. It wasn’t distrust; it was a form of security—both for them and for him.

  Sonnenberger cleared his throat. Photographs of fish—his proudest catches—hung on the wall behind him. Baltic Sea salmon, carp from Lake Balaton, brill from the Black Sea. Sunlight glinted off their scales and the major’s smile. A bamboo pole with a handle made of cork and small metal eyes was suspended above the photographs. The handle was worn and had probably pulled many a fish through the water to score yet another success for the frames in his office.