IGMS Issue 11 Read online

  "What's if it's just . . . I don't know, random. Coincidence."

  "I don't buy that. I'm a mathematician, Henry. Anyway I was a mathematician, before I put together my little software company. This place may be impossible, but the odds against a common pattern when two of the three of us have an obvious connection? Maybe not totally impossible . . . let's just say highly unlikely."

  Jansen said, "We sort of have the Wall in common. But it isn't the same. You obviously know a lot about it, what with this Society thing you do. But it's not like you ever served here. You didn't live with it every day, like us. You weren't ever on the Wall --"

  "No," Richter agreed. "I wasn't."

  To Jansen's eye, Richter seemed suddenly tense and hesitant, like someone trying to avoid making up his mind.

  "Well," Jansen spoke up. "What is it? You going to shoot that bird or let it fly?"

  The tall man nodded. "Interesting choice of words."

  "My stupid mouth is half the reason I'm divorced. What'd I say this time?"

  Richter hopped off the sandbags and walked a few steps before answering. When he did, his voice was dry and tight. "My mother was a Berliner."

  "Yeah, you said you were born here. So?"

  "East Berlin, Henry. She died on the Wall."

  Jansen wanted to run again, like before, but his legs wouldn't get him down off the barrier. If he couldn't run, maybe he could scream?

  Not your hell, maybe, you poor bastard. Definitely mine.

  When he finally found words, they surprised him. "You don't sound like you're sure."

  Richter turned and looked at him oddly. Jansen wondered if something unheard in his voice had given him away. He was about to speak again when the tall man finally answered.

  "The records are all scrambled -- when there are records at all -- and they mostly don't have names in them, just scraps of facts and description. An address here, an occupation there, a set of initials, shorthand reports of a thousand disconnected, meaningless conversations . . . it's a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. I've been digging through the archives for a long time, learning how to read what's there and what's been omitted." His mouth tightened. "She died on the Wall, all right. The pieces of the picture are there."

  "But you aren't certain."

  "If you're asking me whether I have the Stasi-stamped file folder to prove it, no." Bitterness colored Richter's voice, and something Jansen couldn't begin to put a name to. He watched as the tall man stared fiercely at the ragged fringe of East German buildings that were visible from here.

  "I never knew her," Richter continued. "My step-parents were friends with my mother, and they brought me with them when they got out of East Germany in 1960. It was her idea. She wasn't well -- pregnancy and childbirth had been rough -- and anyway she knew it would be easier for them, because they'd had a baby who died and they still had the right papers. The idea was that my mother would make it out on her own when she got better, and we'd all be in America together." His faint smile was small and young. "Only they built the Wall, and things didn't work out. She never showed up. One letter made it: nothing else. The Bruckners raised me on their own, in Wisconsin. They were good people. I can't complain."

  "What about your father? Where the hell was he?" Unsummoned, there was a vision of Arl in Jansen's head, crying into Elly's arms because Larry had left without so much as a note two days after the little pink dot on the dipstick changed everything.

  "Apparently I'm the by-product of a little too much Pilsner at a college party. She never told anyone his name, not even the Bruckners, not even with all the pressure of being nineteen and pregnant in a police state where social pressure favored abortion. All I know about der fehlende vater is that he must have been tall and blonde, because according to my step-parents nobody in my mother's family was. It had to come from somewhere."

  The woman at the Wall. Got to be his mother. Goddamit, goddamit, tell him what you saw, you stupid coward . . . but maybe I don't have to. Maybe, maybe if I just shut up he'll talk about something else.

  Where the hell's Gavrilenko?

  At the same moment, Richter said "Enough with my sob story. I seriously don't think your Russian's coming. Let's go find him." He started off without looking back.

  "Hold up," Jansen said, easing down off the sandbags. His knee had stiffened while he was sitting. "Old guy, here. Anyway, maybe we shouldn't be in such a hurry."

  Richter stopped and looked at him quizzically. "Why not?"

  Tell him you saw his mother. Tell him you saw her die. Twice.

  "No reason." Jansen stared into Richter's eyes. How could he have missed how much they looked like hers? "It's just . . . what if we take a different route than he does, coming here, and we miss each other?"

  "Then we'll come back. Anyway, there's not a whole lot of there over there. Come on," Richter said, and this time his grin was a young boy's. "It's not icy, but I bet we can imagine we're sliding across the line."

  The Wall on this side ran behind houses that looked like an abandoned stage or movie set: if the west side looked as though every inhabitant had suddenly left town, but might return at any second, here the air of a forced and permanent evacuation was glaringly inescapable. Doors and windows were not merely boarded over, but bricked up as well; many buildings had been demolished, and the rubble -- often topped with barbed wire -- left in place, to block any passage to the Wall. There were warnings, genuine or not, of minefields -- Richter translated the signs for Jansen -- and the whole effect was of desertion and neglect. The two men walked close together, automatically speaking in low voices and moving at a pace tailored to accommodate Jansen's slower steps.

  Chickenshit. You could walk faster. You're just afraid of getting there.

  Jansen asked presently, "You got into it, this August thing, because of your mom?" But Richter shook his head.

  "Not exactly, not the way you mean. My step-parents wanted me to grow up to be a good American, so I was assimilated as hell. They told me about my mom -- her name was Zinzi, by the way -- but not much else, not until I was older. I definitely had the American habit of not thinking about the past very much, and certainly not some faraway European past that might as well have been in an old library book, as far as I was concerned. My head was all forward, all the time. I went to a good college, studied math and computer programming, got naturalized, taught for a while. I was an assistant professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin when I came to Berlin to drink dark beer and knock down my own piece of the Wall and wound up meeting Annaliese instead. Hah. Hey, I never asked -- you married?"

  "Already told you I was divorced. Twice, actually."

  "Oh. Sorry."

  "Don't be. Just the ways things are." Jansen felt his heart thudding harder in his chest. "My first ex used to say I was a coconut in a world of bananas. I can hurt people just bumping into them."

  "Colorful. Any kids?"

  "Two daughters. They hate my guts too, but the pregnant one hates me worse. So there's a bright spot."

  Richter stopped walking and turned to face Jansen. "Even if things righteously suck with your kids, I'm sure you remember when they were little. So maybe you'll get this. When Jacob -- my son -- when Jacob turned six months old, the same age I was when I was brought to America . . . I remember, I looked down at him in my arms, burping bubbles and trying to eat my shirt buttons, and I tried to imagine what Zinzi Richter would have said if she could have seen him, her first grandchild. And I thought how lucky I was to be able to tell him everything my step-parents had told me about her, even if it wasn't all that much. Then I started thinking about all the people who wouldn't ever know what happened to their grandparents or their parents, and I'd read about the August 13 Society, and one thing led to another. I'd started up my company by then -- we do case management software for big legal firms -- and our code was pretty useful for what the Society does, so I had an in. And here I am." He smiled crookedly, spreading his hands.

 
"Makes sense," Jansen said.

  "You should tell Jacob that. He thinks I'm crazy. My mother really is just a page in a scrapbook to him. He's going to be fifteen next June, and what he likes about coming over here is that he's tall enough now to get away with telling the local girls he's really seventeen."

  They started on again, both of them unconsciously keeping to the right side of the road, away from the darkness they could see on the other side of the decayed and empty buildings. To Jansen it definitely seemed closer here, which bothered him. He thought of the suddenly open door back on the Axel-Springer-Strasse, and the words herding us passed through his mind.

  Richter said, "You can tell I'm nervous, because I'm talking too much."

  That surprised Jansen. "You don't act nervous."

  "Quaking in my Nikes. Not the slightest sign of danger since I showed up here, but this place is really starting to creep me out. Hence the talking."

  "So talk," Jansen said firmly. "Tell me more about your kids."

  "I'd rather listen. Tell me what you do."

  Jansen grunted, waved the question away.

  "No, seriously."

  "Nothing important. I remodel stuff. Kitchens and bathrooms, mostly. One-man gang, hire extra help when I have to. Been doing it more or less since I left the Army."

  "That's good work," Richter said. "You do your job, and then when you're finished, when you look at what you've done, you get to see that you've made something better, made it work, made it beautiful. There's pride in that. You're a lucky man."

  "Gavrilenko called me that too," Jansen said slowly. "I don't think I'm so damn lucky." Richter regarded him curiously. Jansen said, "I'm good with my hands, with wood and tile and plastic piping, but that's it. Sinks and toilets, cabinets and countertops? Sure. People? Forget it. My exes, my kids, they're all right about me. Since I got back from Germany, I can't think of one damn thing that's gone right, except work. Not one damn thing in forty years."

  Richter said, "It's the Wall." Jansen looked up in surprise. "People I work with -- former refugees, their families -- they tell a story that one guy who didn't make it over put a curse on the Wall with his dying breath. He made it so even if you escape, even with the Wall down and gone, there's still a curse that follows you in your life. Because you got out and he didn't."

  Jansen thought nobody ever gets out. But what he said was "No offense, but that's bullshit. Anyway, I didn't have anything to escape from. I did my time, got rotated to Stuttgart and then stateside. Period."

  They walked a little way further in silence before Richter continued. "Maybe. But people tell stories like that because they mean something. And you said yourself that your troubles started here. It wasn't all snowball fights, Henry."

  "Crap. I was a kid."

  "Which makes it better how?" Richter's tone had shifted, the hint of impatience becoming more pronounced. "Good lord, man, you know I've been through the East German records fifty-seven times. I'm the guy with the damn database. So why are you dancing with me like this? Even on the official record there are at least three or four deaths that correlate with the time you must have been here. Fechter, he's the most famous, but there were others. And at least twenty, thirty more the Society is researching. Are you telling me none of that ever touched you, that you never saw anything? If not, then why the hell are you here? What's our connection?"

  Jansen was shaking his head before Richter was halfway finished. "That's not it! It can't be it."

  "What can't be it?"

  Jansen started to turn away, but Richter squared off on him. The tall man's hands came down on Jansen's shoulders, and they were bigger hands than Jansen had noticed. He said nothing. He only waited.

  Oh, God.

  Jansen said tonelessly, "You can't put this on me."

  "I didn't," Richter answered. "But you can take it off."

  "Shit!" For just a moment Jansen couldn't breathe.

  Richter's eyes were hot behind a face suddenly flattened into an unyielding mask. "I'm not an idiot. You've been wanting to tell me something since we were back at the sandbags. Spill."

  "I -- I don't know who it was. Just some girl, some woman . . . I never knew her name." Jansen heard the sirens and shouting, the gunfire; only by Richter's lack of reaction did he understand that the blaring cacophony was all in his head. "But I'll never forget what happened. Hell, I still dream it."

  Richter nodded him on.

  "It was 1963. I was almost out, just screwing around on duty in the observation post, joking with Harding about making a midnight run to clip a little barbed wire off as a souvenir, something to take home with me. Then his eyes went all spooky and he said 'Oh Lord,' just like that, quiet as if we were in a library . . . and I saw what he was seeing. This woman --"

  "Wait a sec. That was the Axel-Springer-Strasse OP?"

  Jansen nodded.

  Richter bored in. "July or November?"

  "July. I wasn't here in November."

  "Tell me what she looked like."

  Jansen felt himself snapping. "Don't make me do this!"

  "Tell me."

  "You have to hear me say it? It was your mother! Of course it was your mother. She had your goddamn eyes, you bastard, and she came out of nowhere on the far side of the Death Strip, and maybe she would have made it if she were a little faster, or maybe she wouldn't, I don't know, I only know it was like they were playing with her, like they could have cut her down at any time, but they waited until she was halfway over the top. Then somebody took her out with a single shot and she lay there on top of the wall for two hours, two goddamn hours, bleeding out, never making a sound until the end, and the whole time I . . . the whole time . . ."

  He turned his head, unable to bear looking into Richter's face.

  "I wanted to go to her. Harding wouldn't let me. I did call the NCOIC and scream for a doctor, for help, for somebody, but nobody came. Nobody came. It was just me and Harding, and he wouldn't look. But for the whole two hours I did. I saw her die."

  Richter's hands closed once, briefly. They seemed to sink past flesh and muscle to leave their fingerprints in his bones; yet, strangely, Jansen felt no pain at all. When Richter let go and lifted them away, something iron went with them that Jansen never tried to name.

  "Yes," Richter said without expression. "I thought that might have been the one." He turned away.

  "That's not all," Jansen said to the tall man's stiffened back.

  Richter slowed down, but didn't stop.

  "Here's the thing." Jansen had to raise his voice as the other man moved away. "You fell asleep in your car, and you woke up here in this theater set, but you didn't get to see the play. Me, I had to watch it all over again. So did Gavrilenko, from his guard tower. The run, the bullets, her death on top of the Wall. Everything. Do you hear me? I saw your mother die all over again . . . and when it was over I saw her climb back down, just like she was getting ready for another show. That's why Gavrilenko and I were supposed to meet. I don't know why I'm here, I swear to God I don't, but whatever I've done wrong in my life I can't possibly deserve having to see that again -- and you don't want to see it either. Trust me on that!"

  Richter stood still and said nothing for what felt to Jansen like a very long time, but which was certainly only seconds. Then he heard Zinzi Richter's son say, simply, "Huh," and had to hurry to catch up with the tall man as he walked, with quickening strides, toward the darkness.

  The guard tower had looked considerably more impressive and ominous from a dingy room in a crumbling apartment house across from the Wall than it did at close range. At once splintery-new and yet already rickety, it had far more of an agricultural air than a military one, looking somewhere between a flattened silo and a hayloft. Jansen felt that there should have been a weathervane on its squared-off roof.

  Richter stopped in his tracks so suddenly that Jansen bumped into his back before he could halt himself. At the foot of the tower stairs stood the ghost of Zinzi Richter.

 
Ashen, slender, with dark auburn hair limp against her skull, as though with sweat, she paid absolutely no attention either to Jansen or to her staring son. All her concentration was directed up the single flight of rusted metal steps to the doorway where a big old man stood hugging himself as he rocked erratically against the doorframe. Zinzi Richter made no attempt to go up to him, but simply stood waiting at the foot of the stair.

  "That's her," Richter whispered. "The Bruckners had one photo. Oh my God."

  As though she had put on her Sunday best for the occasion, the ghost looked as clear and solid as any human being whose heart still jumped in the cage of her ribs, still ordered blood out to her fingertips and back through her throat and her thighs. Richter took a step toward her, but this time it was Jansen's hand clamping hard on his arm. Jansen said softly, "Wait. She's here for him."

  Through binoculars -- the closest acquaintance he had ever had with Leonid Leonidovich Gavrilenko over the Wall -- Jansen had always seen the Russian as bull-featured and powerfully built, with an undomesticated mass of heavy black hair that stood up crazily on either side of his broad, high-boned face when he pulled off his knit woolen cap. The man he saw now had none of that force, nothing of that implicit swagger: he only slumped against the doorframe, his lips moving as though in prayer. Jansen thought, He's old; and then, No, I'm old, and I don't look like that. What's happened to him?

  "That's why he didn't come to the checkpoint. He can't come down," Jansen said to Richter. "She's there, and he's afraid of her."

  Richter ignored him. He pulled away from Jansen's grip and approached the ghost of Zinzi Richter, plainly trying not to run to her. He said, "Mother, it's me, I'm your son. I'm Bernd." He tried to take her hands in his, but she did not move, or look at him, or respond in any way. She stayed where she was, looking up the stair at Gavrilenko.