The Berlin Crossing (33 page)

Yet within seconds he found himself lying on top of the wide structure. He gathered his breath and his strength and began
to haul the ladder upwards. He tried to lift it clear of the Wall but it moaned against the stone. Still no alarms, no shouts
in the night. He lowered the ladder on the other side, pushed downwards on it, trying to secure it.

And when it was done he lifted his head to look at Berlin. Behind him, to the east, scattered lights glimmered above the dark
streets. Ahead, to the west, stretched the brighter night, a panoply of orange and sodium lights, the roar of traffic.

And he was on top of the fabled, demonic Wall. Did Ingham realize you could raise a borrowed ladder and just climb over the
damn thing?

‘The Wall isn’t just a wall.’ Corporal Adams’ words came back to him. ‘It’s a complete fucking obstacle course.’ Those obstacles
stretched ahead of him now, all the way to West Berlin: the tank barriers, the alarmed fence, the anti-vehicle trench. He
could see them now, spaced out in the dim light of no-man’s-land. A hundred yards to his right rose an observation tower,
with its circling beacon light; just one of a series that ran the length of the Wall.

‘A killing zone,’ Adams had said.

He shivered, hugging the top of the Wall.

Move
. You’re not here to make it. You’re here because you love those wounded fingers, those mysterious turquoise eyes.

He waited, counted the seconds between the circuits of the watchtower light.
Now
. He inched his way down the ladder, drew
his breath as he stood on the wet surface of no-man’s-land. Hurriedly he pulled the ladder down, laid it against the foot
of the Wall.

He knew that he had never been so alert, so
alive
, as in these last moments. His hands tingled from the snow, the ladder, the Wall. His nostrils twitched, filled with the
metallic smell of cement, of steel. And something else:
dog shit
. He’d forgotten about the dogs, about Adams’ warning: ‘They’re trained to kill.’

Not that way, not the dogs
.

He began to crawl towards the tank barriers. The search-light swung round and he froze, waited for the shout, the gunfire.

The light swept over him in silence and he crawled on, hugging the frozen ground. He was under the line of tank barriers,
past them. He drew level with the observation tower, was beyond it. He could see the pathway used by the patrolling guards,
slick and shiny under the snow and the lights. And beyond, within reach, the last barrier, the final frontier. He could see
the lights beyond the Wall, could taste them, almost touch them. He could make it if he tried.

Don’t move. You are here in no-man’s-land so that she can live. In the precious metal of your father’s shop you found nothing
of value; on the dark side of the Wall you discovered the treasure of love and loving. Now guard that love with your life
.

The circling searchlight swept towards him. He felt in his pocket for the carefully folded paper with the Prenzlauer Berg
address. He pushed the paper deeper into his pocket, reassured. Its discovery would be her passport to life.

He waited for the searchlight, rose to his knees to meet it. The light blinded him, swept past him. From the watchtower a
shout, then another, the light swung back. For a second he was splayed in its yellow beam.
Move. If you don’t they’ll take you alive
.

He ran from the light, from the shouts, but no-man’s-land was floodlit now, a noonday blaze with nowhere to hide.

The first bullet caught him high on the shoulder, spun him round, facing the east. He knew her face, saw her huge eyes open,
waiting for him. He called her name, reached out beyond the blazing lights to where she smiled at him from behind the stars.
And then it was neither night nor day, neither dark nor light, just a white stillness falling around him. Just for a second
his broken body burned with the searing metal but then the snow entered him and he knew that he was falling into her arms.

On a bitter Tuesday in January 1963, Petra Ritter married Johannes Vos in the Rathaus of Fürstenwalde. Their marriage was
witnessed by the Deputy Mayor and a clerk from the Accounts Section. Petra was showing by then, the lilac linen dress stretched
taut across the incipient bulge of her stomach. Johannes was showing too, but in his case it was the cancer that was becoming
more evident: his sunken cheeks were the colour of wax; more than once, during the brief ceremony in the Deputy Mayor’s office,
Petra had seen his features crease and flinch with pain.

The marriage was Johannes’ idea. He’d said nothing at first when she’d been sick in his flat; in those dark nights he could
see the strain in her pale face but he hadn’t asked, was fearful of intruding.

She had longed to tell Johannes. The not knowing was hell, the wondering where he was, whether Roland was even alive. She
knew the contents of the notebook by heart, treasured the words like a much-loved melody. And as each day passed and still
the Stasi did not come for her, she tried to convince herself that he had got away.

And that he would come back for her, take her to that life, that world, that he had crammed into the small pages of the notebook
in the cellar of the allotment shed. It was a hope she had nursed
through the nights after his leaving, after she found the notebook in the cellar.

The hammering on her door early on that Saturday morning had murdered that hope. Pastor Bruck’s young son stood there, sobbing,
incoherent, incomprehensible, until at last she managed to calm the boy enough to learn that his father had been taken to
the hospital.

She found the pastor in a corner bed in a ward filled with old men, reeking of disinfectant and piss. He hadn’t wanted to
meet her eyes and that frightened her more than the bandages, more than the traction pulleys that held the pastor’s legs raised
above the bed. She knew the pastor for a man of courage, a man unafraid to face pain, to tell it like it was.

When he finally looked at her, he told it in a rush, as if it were something evil that he wanted rid of. How the Stasi with
the yellow eyes had descended upon his church at dead of night, roaring drunk, the truck engine revving, the church door battered
and kicked. Two others with him, sober, obedient, menacing. They were the ones who’d slid the long wooden box off the back
of the truck; it was they who, under Major Fuchs’s barked orders, had crowbarred the lid off the cheap coffin. The light of
the moon was enough to let Pastor Bruck see the decaying face of the young man he’d first encountered in Marta’s flat in Prenzlauer
Berg. When he was finished retching on the grass, they’d handed him a spade, another to his son, Thomas, and shown him where
to dig the grave in a quiet place behind the church cottage. ‘I know you had something to do with this fucker,’ Major Fuchs
had snarled, ‘and now my boss wants him disappeared, so bury the fucker.’ They’d watched him sweat, swore at his progress.
When he’d finished, when the earth had been heaved back on top of the coffin, Major Fuchs took the spade from him and swung
it once against the priest’s back. And as he buckled slowly to the ground,
Fuchs raised the iron spade above his head and caught the pastor with a downward blow across the base of his spine. ‘Something
to remember me by,’ Major Fuchs said. They drove off noisily but Pastor Bruck had passed out by then on the frozen ground.

‘My son got the doctor.’ He met Petra’s eyes then. The doctor came and brought me here.’ He touched the white neck brace.
‘They tell me I’ll walk but I have broken discs at the top and bottom of my spine.’

She’d started to cry, sitting there on the metal-framed chair in the ward, but Pastor Bruck reached for her hand and spoke
urgently to her.

‘You must be strong now and keep these things locked in your heart. The man who came last night is a mad dog but he knows
nothing, he has only his suspicions and anyway he has suspicions of the whole world.’ He looked shrewdly at her, his voice
a whisper. ‘Are you pregnant, Petra?’

She nodded, still weeping.

‘Then you must be very careful indeed,’ he said.

Johannes Vos said the same thing when, finally, she told him what had happened. ‘We must get married,’ Johannes had said.
He saw the puzzlement, even alarm, on her face and said hurriedly, ‘Don’t worry, Petra, not like that, but your baby needs
a father – you need a father for your baby. It will stop the questions, they won’t come bothering you again with their questions.’

It wasn’t hard to see the sense in what he said.

Johannes put on his best suit and a yellow tie to drive them to Fürstenwalde. He had to stop once on the way to be sick at
the side of the road. On the way home to Bad Saarow after the ceremony, he had to make two stops. He smiled at Petra, wiping
the sweat from his face in the car. ‘What a man you’ve got for a husband.’

She took the handkerchief from him, patted his face gently. ‘You
are
a man,’ she told him.

She nursed him in the apartment until he died, in his sleep, two weeks later. She sat beside him for a long while before she
sent for the doctor. His death was another grief that had to be acknowledged, taken into her heart.

It would have been easy to feel that there was room in her heart for nothing but grief but her growing belly told her otherwise.
There was a baby to think about.

When she applied for a new work assignment, she was surprised by the speedy, positive response. Maybe, she thought, the Deputy
Director wanted rid of her, the way you wanted to get rid of a bad smell. She didn’t care where she was sent; one place was
as good as another now. Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, the notice of assignment from the district office said: at least it wasn’t
a long journey.

A young colleague from the Institute helped her to load Johannes’ few bits of furniture on to a borrowed truck on a Saturday
in April. He drove the truck to Brandenburg; Petra followed behind in Johannes’ Lada, glad that she had learned to drive,
however erratically. The sun shone palely; the savings that Johannes had left her were reassuring in her purse. When they
drew up outside the flat she’d been allocated, opposite the railway station in Brandenburg, a little more of the grief softened
inside her. The place needed a thorough cleaning, she thought, surveying the empty rooms, and the whole thing could do with
a coat of paint (wherever that might come from) but for the first time she began to feel that she might be able to survive
all that had gone before and whatever else might be thrown at her in the years to come.

Her hand still pained her but she nursed it in silence, careful to make no complaint stacking and carrying reams of paper
at the
mill. She understood that from now on the only work she would be offered would be unskilled labour – and that, too, was unimportant
to her. She never again touched her broken violin, never lifted it from Johannes’ old trunk, locked, stowed under her bed.
The very mindlessness of her new work soothed her; she worked at it until the day before her son was born.

Petra had never realized, until she was handed her wet, still-bloodied infant, just how much you could read in the features
of a newborn baby. The midwife assured her that the baby looked like his mother, but his mother knew better: in those calm
eyes, in that stubborn chin and unyielding jaw, Petra saw clearly that this bawling boy was the spit of his Irish father.
The crown of dark thatch was merely confirmation.

She’d like to have called the boy Roland but to do so would, perhaps, have invited disaster and made a mockery of Johannes’
marriage to her. At the same time, Johannes was
not
the boy’s father, so that name would not do either. She didn’t know how or why she chose the name Michael. She was groggy,
half-asleep, when the hospital secretary came round to take particulars for the birth certificate. ‘Michael,’ she said, and
Michael it was. It was as good a name as any.

What she feared most was that they would take the boy from her. Too much had been taken from her; she wasn’t sure that she
could survive another loss, another parting. To this end she became, as much as possible, an exemplary worker. She kept her
house clean and her opinions to herself. She went to services in the small Lutheran church near her flat but never referred
at work to her attendance.

She didn’t have the boy baptized. It was, she told Pastor Bruck when she visited him that autumn in Bad Saarow, too much of
a risk. ‘I can’t afford to antagonize them,’ she said. ‘He’s all I’ve got, all I have left.’ The pastor looked at his own
son, thickset,
muscular, absent-mindedly whittling a lump of wood, and nodded: you did what you had to do.

Petra never visited Pastor Bruck again. They both understood that to do so might alert the ever-watching eyes, the always-listening
ears.

She devoted herself to her work and to the boy. Whatever misgivings she had about Michael’s developing interests were kept
to herself. She said nothing about his Boys Brigade uniform, his devotion to his GDR homeland. His progress at school, his
accomplishments on the athletics field pleased her and she showed pride and pleasure in him. He took her pride as his due.
Even so, the depth and extent of her pride when he was selected – when he was
allowed
– to study English at the University of Rostock was a puzzle to Michael himself. ‘What’s the big deal, Mutti?’ he asked,
as she read the letter of acceptance for the umpteenth time. ‘It’s just English at Rostock.’ She didn’t answer but he could
see tears in her eyes and he was too young to guess that there might be more than normal parental pride on display.

She was pleased, too, that he chose to live at home when he came back,
Herr Doktor Ritter
, to teach in his home town. ‘Where else would I live, Mutti?’ He was fascinated by her reaction to his book,
Workers’ Dawn
, a collection of short stories published while he was teaching. Sometimes, at night, he’d lift his head from the essays he
was correcting and he’d look over at her, seated on the ancient sofa, turning the pages of his book, rapt. Petra was wearing
glasses by then, there was grey in her hair, but even Michael knew that his mother was still a beautiful woman. ‘You must
know
Workers’ Dawn
by heart, Mutti,’ he said to her once. ‘Maybe you should write your own story.’