Peter E. Vogel, Jr.
The wall is coming down today.
At first glance, the edifice seems indestructible. It stands twenty feet high and casts a looming shadow to the west, a hulking mass of concrete topped with shining razor wire. The barrier stretches out in either direction, rolling with the little hills and dips of the countryside, until its dark form snakes out of sight, behind a cluster of ruined buildings.
On the eastern side there is nothing but rubble, bombed-out townhouses left abandoned for fifty years. Some of the structures have been further demolished since then, especially those that come too close to the wall itself. Now the motion sensors and all the shrapnel mines have been removed, but the memory lingers. It is a no man’s land, a place where blood has soaked the stone and brick, where a few desperate mean and women choked out their last breath under the sodium glare of a dozen searchlights.
Now the wall stands silent. Both sides are covered by graffiti, slogans of freedom and mural artwork, memorials to those who did not live to see the end of it. Wreaths and banners hang from the guard towers, one every hundred meters or so. Most of the towers are boarded up, their cupolas empty, their searchlights removed, leaving exposed wires and metal brackets, here and there a shattered window. It is this way everywhere along the border. Everywhere the wall is crumbling.
Along one portion of the wall, not far south of the Brandenburg Gate, there is a massive pile of wreaths and flowers, a place left bare of graffiti. It is a famous place, at least to those who remember such things. This is where the tunnel came through, the one they found in ’78. It carried dozens beneath the wall, to be received in a secret safehouse only half a block away. When the guards on the Eastern side found the tunnel, they filled in the entrance with rock and cement. Many still come here to give their thanks, or to remember the ones who never reached the other side.
* * * * *
On a cold spring evening in the month of February, two soldiers perched atop one of the glass and concrete towers that dotted the wall, sweeping the field of broken rubble for any sign of movement. One stood behind the searchlight, holding onto side grips as he passed the light over ever shadow. The other leaned over the machine gun rig, resting his chin on folded arms, and rocking the weapon gently back and forth in its cradle.
“Hey Karl,” the one on the searchlight said.
The one called Karl grunted, staring absently out at the lights of East Berlin.
“How long till the next IR sweep?”
Karl sighed, and looked down to glance at his watch. “Four minutes.”
The other soldier smiled. “Then I have time for a cigarette.”
He took one from his breast pocket and began to pat his fatigues, looking for matches. Karl watched him search for a few seconds, then pulled out his own lighter and extended the flame to his companion.
The searchlight operator took it and thanked him. He lingered for a moment on a suspicious looking object, but discovered it was only an old paper bag, carried across the open field by the wind.
“The Lieutenant won’t be walking across that way, Ray,” said Karl, pulling out his own cigarette. “In fact, I doubt he’s coming at all.”
Raymond, who was the younger of the two men, sniffed at the statement. “You don’t know that. I mean, maybe he doesn’t know they found him out. He’s been missing for three weeks. How would he know?”
“Because the Lieutenant’s not that stupid.” Karl took a long drag on his Verbenlich cigarette, and stood up to stretch. “He got all those people through under everybody’s nose, he has to have learned something. Besides, he knows us. He wouldn’t risk it.”
Raymond coughed, and the searchlight dipped briefly in its track. “These things are crap. So what are you saying, that we just shoot on sight?”
Raymond turned to look at his companion, but all he could see was Karl’s dark, helmeted silhouette, and the tiny orange glow from his Verbenlich.
“Those are the orders. I have no problem with it,” Karl said coldly. “And if you do, you had better keep it to yourself, Ray. The Stazi are listening.”
Raymond turned quickly back to the searchlight, but glanced briefly back at Karl. “You’re not Stazi, are you?”
Karl laughed. “If I was, would I tell you? Now shut up and get on the light, while I get the IR rig ready.”
Raymond nodded slowly, and concentrated on his duty. He kept sweeping over the rubble, watching for any movement that might betray the Lieutenant’s presence.
* * * * *
Across the barren expanse of stone and bare lifeless earth, a man crouched in shadow. He concealed himself behind the hulk of an old Russian tank, left here where it was stopped in 1945, in honor of Berlin’s Russian liberators. He had passed by the wreck many times in the daylight, pretending to admire it as a piece of history. In truth, it had made an excellent hiding place for those making the trip to the West, a place to conceal themselves until the sun went down.
The man, the lieutenant now labeled a traitor, ducked down as the lights passed close to the tank, hoping he had a few minutes before they switched to infrared. A cold wind blew across the exclusion zone, but his uniform was already soaked in sweat. He had been running and hiding for most of the day, trying to get past the other checkpoints, and closer to the wall. He could feel the congestion forming in his chest with each ragged breath. Two weeks spent in hiding in a barn had done no good for his health; he fought down the urge to cough, and glanced at his watch.
The Lieutenant poked his head around the side of the tank, trying to offer as little a profile as possible. He could imagine the snipers and machine gunners on the towers, looking through their scopes and nigh vision binoculars, waiting for the top of a head to present itself. He squinted against the glare from lights, and saw only two soldiers manned the tower to the south. He glanced quickly across the no-man’s land, but there were no dog patrols visible. The other officers had probably sent most of the guards down to patrol the southern section of the wall, where there were fewer towers. He imagined his superior in the guard-post office right now, ranting about how he won’t let some young traitor humiliate their battalion. His commanders would be adamant about bringing the traitor in on his own, and given that the main tunnel had been completely filled in, the southern section would be the obvious place to look.
The Lieutenant waited until the searchlights had passed by again. Then he crept away, crawling on his belly until he was safely behind one of the abandoned buildings. He didn’t follow the route he had used to smuggle defectors across many times before. Instead he moved parallel to the wall, hidden from the snipers by half-collapsed buildings and long shadows. The other way was safer, but it also led to where he knew the Stazi would be waiting. They would be hiding across the street, keeping watch over the little one car garage where the entrance to the tunnel was concealed. They would sit there all night, on the off chance that the Lieutenant was stupid enough to try and escape that way.
But there was another tunnel, one of which even his friends in the West had been unaware. A dissident group had managed to get find some allies on the construction crews that worked on the wall, and those men had eventually met the Lieutenant through mutual contacts. The dissidents claimed they had completed the tunnel some time ago, but had never used it, preferring to rely on the older, proven route.
The Lieutenant saw the tool shed up ahead, only a dozen meters away from where he was hiding. He crouched as low as he could without lying down, and prepared to dash for the door. Soon, they would switch off the searchlights so they could use the infrared. In those few moments, he would be inside the shed and down into the tunnel. He looked at his watch again, trying to ignore the rushing blood and the heavy feeling in his chest. The Lieutenant began to wonder if the soldiers had forgotten about the infrared sweep, and the thought nearly panicked him. Another half-hour in the open would be nearly suicidal. He peered up at the tower, where the two soldiers were smoking cigarettes, and waited.
Suddenly, the searchlight went dark. The Lieutenant’s vision filled with a dance of bright flashes. He cursed himself for looking at the bright light and started to run despite his sudden blindness. He bolted toward the vague shape of the tool shed, and felt his foot hit one of the stones. He didn’t fall, but before he had gotten three steps, he knew they had seen him. Someone shouted, and the air was filled with the sound of sirens. The searchlights came back on, and then came the machine gun fire. The Lieutenant saw the flash from the tower and heard the zip-zip of passing bullets in the air around him. He grabbed for the door and ran into the shed, slamming the flimsy door behind him.
He stopped to catch his breath, and took a second to look around. Shovels, picks, and bags of cement and gravel filled the shed, which despite the flimsy wooden walls provided some protection against the hail of gunfire from the watchtower. It occurred to him that the cement was probably here to fill up escape tunnels; despite the urgency of the situation, he laughed. The Lieutenant scratched at the floorboards with his fingers, looking for the loose board his contact promised would be here. After a few seconds of frantic searching he found it, hidden under some heavy bags in the corner. He felt the bullets piercing the wooden walls above him, but in a few seconds he was down inside.
The tunnel resembled an animal’s warren more than an escape route for dissidents. Constructed of packed earth supported by thin wooden beams, it was barely wide enough for a single man. The Lieutenant crawled on his belly once more, moving as quickly as possible through the darkness. The air smelled stale. He dragged himself along despite the heaving in his lungs and the smell of earth. He kept listening for sounds of pursuit, but there was nothing.
He felt a series of vibrations from somewhere above him, the impact of soldier boots, running across the exclusion zone. A few moments later, he heard the hand grenades go off, followed by several hundred rounds of rifle fire. Within moments, he knew, they would begin searching for his body, and probably find the entrance to the tunnel. He began moving again, skinning his elbows on the heard earth. He reached a spot where a large boulder intruded into the tunnel, and turned himself sideways to squeeze past it. Dirt crumbled from above, and struck him in the face. The Lieutenant coughed loudly, and cursed. He pushed past the boulder, and kept crawling.
A dull throbbing sensation filled the Lieutenant’s head, and he began to wheeze. The air felt heavy. He tried to breath more deeply, to compensate for the lack of oxygen, but this only made his chest hurt more. A foul taste filled the Lieutenant’s throat, the taste of clay and blood, mixed with dying air. He tried to push himself in spurts, kicking out with his legs to move faster, but the tunnel was too narrow, and he kept hitting his head on the roof, bringing more dirt down on top of him. He couldn’t stop coughing now, and he knew the dogs could hear him. Once they found the tunnel, he knew, they would fill it with gas, or water.
He dug his fingers into the earth, dragging himself along the tunnel, fighting the sparkling bursts behind his eyes, beckoning him to unconsciousness. He tried to imagine the distance, but his mind wouldn’t focus. The Lieutenant heaved another deep breath, and pulled himself up a minor slope in the tunnel.
His hands felt brick. It covered the end of the tunnel, just as it began to slope upwards. Next to the tunnel he could feel the shape of a small pick, and a few small chunks of broken brick.
The dissidents had never finished the tunnel.
The Lieutenant tried to cry out, but his lungs felt as if they were filled with earth. He tried to grab the pick, to smack it against the wall. He fumbled with it, then collapsed. He rolled over on his back, exhaled a fistful of dust, and felt the darkness sweep in to cover him.
* * * * *
He heard a voice. Somebody was speaking to him in English.
Several pairs of hands placed the Lieutenant on a stretcher. He blinked and looked at the group of large men in American Army uniforms surrounding him. They were all crowded into a little room, in what looked like a basement. A single light bulb hung bare from a wire in the ceiling, and a set of narrow stairs led upward. He looked around, and saw a pile of broken bricks in one wall of the basement, thrown aside. Some of the American soldiers held picks and hammers. They were all staring him and smiling.
One of the soldiers, a very tall man with a bushy dark moustache, leaned forward and spoke to him in German.
“You are lucky,” he said, patting the Lieutenant roughly on the shoulder. "We heard the sirens, and started checking our instruments. Our microphones picked up your breathing. You want anything?”
“You can hear breathing underground?” said the Lieutenant.
One of the other soldiers, bearing an officer’s insignia, said something cautionary in English.
The officer knew very little of the language. “Cig . . . cigarette?”
The medical personnel shook their heads vigorously, but the German-speaking soldier handed him one anyway. “For later,” he said in English.
The Lieutenant took the cigarette and held it to his nose, inhaling deeply.
Good cigarette.