Short Story - Behind The Berlin Wall

I struggled to open the rotted window sash in the bathroom that morning. The window always swelled in the heat and it was already hot. It gave way a little, then a little more. Noise from the street -- fighting neighbors, banging metal trashcans, barking dogs -- blew in on a gust of sticky air.

Lukas seemed to be worried all the time in those days; days laden with something heavier than long hours, low wages and the weight of all the hopes he had -- we had -- for our future. We had so many hopes then. We lived in the Mitte District of East Berlin with my grandmother, but we were planning to move west soon. Anywhere west. We talked about London. I was born there, but my memories of it are vague.

Sometimes images still come to me just before I fall asleep. Gauzy feelings and muted echoes appear like tiny hummingbirds out of nowhere and then in an instant, disappear, leaving a residue of disbelief: my father's dark eyes, his bushy mustached smile, the spicy-sweet smell of bay rum, his deep and resonant laugh sounding very far away. There's a big chair in front of a fireplace. I'm sitting on his lap. I squirm as he tickles me and his scratchy uniform stings my bare skin.

On January 31, 1933, the day after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, my father packed up his young pregnant wife and his mother and left Berlin for London. They moved into the little two bedroom apartment over a pastry shop where I was born seven months later. We lived in that little apartment for the first seven years of my life, but I can't remember much about it: a little cot next to a window is all ... and I remember my Nana's soft, wrinkled face, lit by the moon, sleeping.

September 3, 1939 was my sixth birthday. It was also the day that Great Britain declared war on Germany ... and the day my father enlisted in the British army. I remember he came home carrying a birthday cake from the pastry shop downstairs, dressed in his new uniform.

Mama died the following year in a bombing raid. She was sick that day and Nana had taken me to the park. I was on the swings when the air raid sirens started wailing. Nana ran toward me and grabbed me by the arm. We ran out of the park and into the street that was suddenly overflowing with people. Like a river of chaos sweeping us up in its current, it carried us away. We heard the droning motors of the planes getting louder. Nana gripped my arm tightly and kept tugging it as we ran. She was trying to pick me up and carry me, but she would have had to stop for a second and we could not stop. The frantic motion pushed us forward around corners and finally deposited us at the entrance to a bomb shelter. We were barely inside when the earth exploded and shook. The single light bulb that hung at the end of a wire from the low ceiling flickered and then went out leaving all of us strangers huddled in blackness, suffocating. I clung to Nana in the dark and burrowed my face in her neck. I remember the fresh powdery smell of flowers.

I've tried many times over the years to recall my mother's face, but an image won't come. No photographs survived the Nazis, you see. The day after the bombing Nana and I moved in with a family somewhere in the English countryside; I don't remember the name of the village. It rained a lot there.

After the war was over, Nana and I went back to Berlin. I remember her holding my hand as we walked for blocks and blocks down empty streets between mountains of broken concrete, snarled with the iron and steel entrails of a disemboweled city. She seemed not to notice the tears rolling down her cheeks; she just kept us walking at a slow, methodical pace. I tried to do what I thought she wanted me to do and didn't mention her tears. She didn't say a word, so I didn't say a word. She didn't turn her head. I tried not to turn my head too, but I kept checking her face. I couldn't help it. The steady rhythm of our footsteps scratched over sand and mortar, the earthen tears of a thousand homes, shops, neighborhoods. Still, we kept walking. Nana held firmly to my hand. I can still feel it -- here, on my palm.

We walked all the way to a little farm house outside the city that had once belonged to Nana's brother and now belonged Nana. When I asked her why we were going there, she told me that my papa grew up on this farm and that's where he will look for us when he comes home from the war.

I remember entering the farmhouse for the first time. The door moaned as Nana opened it. It was dark and shadowy, like a charcoal drawing. Strands of sunlight streamed through a hole in the roof. The air twinkled as tiny bits of dust drifted into the light and then out again.

We did alright, Nana and I, at least compared to most. The Russians took over everything, but we stayed on the farm, pretending not to notice. We knew that it was only a matter of time before we would be evicted and moved to one of the community farms, but we kept our "heads down and our eyes on the crops," as Nana would say.

Nana never believed that the Russians would stay. She waited as patiently for them to leave as she did for my papa to come home. But the Russians did not leave, of course, and papa did not come home. Eventually the GDR took the farm. They would have moved us further east, but I was old enough by then to go to college so we were able to move into a small flat in in the Weiss District of East Berlin.

We were still living there when Lukas and I got married in 1956. Nana loved Lukas but she worried about his politics ... and his friends. She always said that he had a thing or two to learn from her about keeping his head down. "That was why we were able to stay on the farm as long as we did," she said again and again. This was always followed by: "You never know who is listening!"

Lukas would smile his smile at her and tell her that he would be careful as he gave her a kiss on her forehead. Then he would pretend there was nothing to worry about.

Then she'd say to me, because she was as afraid of reminding him too much -- almost as much as she was afraid of not reminding him enough: "he's already spent a year in a communist prison because of his politics, and now he has a wife to think about and he sure can't be making me a great grandmother from a prison cell!"

August 12, 1961. That morning, Lukas stirred in his sleep, stretching under the thin sheet that clung to his skin. I stepped out of the bath and wrapped myself in a towel. I used to love the smell of soap. I sat on the edge of the bed beside him and touched him through the sheet. My hand moved down his back. Then I leaned over him and kissed him awake.
"It's time to get up now."
"What time is it?"
"Almost eight-thirty."
I combed my fingers through his black hair and kissed him once more before getting up. "I'll make some coffee," I said. In those days, we were lucky that we could afford coffeee; lots of people couldn't.

In those days, I worked as a waitress in the Tiergarten District in the British Sector of West Berlin and was paid in Westmarks . Since my Ausweises showed that I was a resident of East Berlin I could exchange one Westmark for four East German Ostmarks and that could go a long way in East Berlin in the sixties. Sometimes I got tipped in pounds sterling, which was even better.

Lukas wasn't allowed to work in West Berlin; he wasn't even allowed to go there because he'd been arrested in the worker's uprising of 1953. Since then, every application to the GDR for permission to travel had been denied.
The communists have very long memories.

After The War, The West was included in on America's Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. Money -- money in dollars -- poured into West Berlin, rebuilding the western half of the city, but the east languished in red poverty and rubble. You can't know unless you've seen it. It was like an open wound.

More than two and a half million East Germans had escaped to the west by 1961. Lukas and I planned to be among them some day, but Lukas wasn't allowed to leave and I wouldn't leave without Lukas. It was still too dangerous for him to try to get out without permission. We were always thinking that things would be getting better soon. It was always going to be soon. Lukas tried to convince me to go anyway, but then there was always Nana and she refused to leave until papa came home. There was no hope anymore, of course. Papa had been declared missing in action in 1940 but Nana used to say that he could still be alive; he could have lost his memory, she'd say, and be living somewhere in Europe. She said that some day he would get his memory back and come home.

That was Nana.

Before Lukas met me he had been a handsome young professor of literature at Humbolt University, but of course he lost his job after his arrest. After he got out of prison, he went to work in a bookstore that belonged to a friend of his father's and worked there ever since, just around the corner from our apartment. How he loved books! His days were slow and quiet and he had time to read the merchandise. -- But as ships are not built to stay in harbor, a man such as Lukas was not meant to live quietly.

Anyway, that morning he sat up on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes awake. I had finished getting dressed for work and brought him his cup of coffee.
"There's no cream," I said.
"That's all right.
"Or sugar either," I kissed him on his temple. "At any price, I'm afraid."
"That's all right. Better to save the money anyway."
"I'll pick some up in The West this afternoon. You should have sugar for your coffee. We can afford it." I slipped into my shoes and smoothed my stockings. "I'm working a double today. Alexa asked me to pick up her dinner shift. So don't wait dinner on me; I won't get off until late tonight."
"Ok," he said. "Maybe I'll go to the pub after work and do some writing." He took a sip of coffee.

It was hard for him, you see, that I worked and made so much more money than he did. I sat down beside him on the edge of the bed. I hated to leave. I remember that day especially, I hated to leave.

"Tell me the story again." I put my arms around his neck and whispered in his ear.
"Now? You have to leave for work. Why do you want to hear it now?"
"Because I won't see you all day and I want to hear you tell me the story so I can take it with me." I nuzzled my face into his neck, kissing him ticklish kisses.
"Ok, ok!"
He put his cup of coffee down on the nightstand and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me with him as we fell back onto the pillows. With my head resting on his chest, he stroked my hair. He began the story as if it was the first time he's ever told it.

"It was June. A very warm night. A breeze was bringing a faint scent of oster-veigeler up from the riverbanks. I was just closing up the bookshop, fingering around in my coat pocket for the key, when I felt the rush of a five mark note I had forgotten I had. Suddenly a rich man, I decided to go to the pub for a beer."

He pressed his lips against my forehead so I could feel his words on my skin.

"The night was so quiet. I don't think I have ever heard it so quiet. It was as though the world was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen. The sound of my footsteps echoed off the buildings as I made my way down the street and around the corner to the pub. As I got closer, the muffled sounds of laughter and singing grew louder. With one hand on the fiver in my pocket and the other on the handle of the pub door, I pulled it open and stepped inside, thinking about whether I would have pretzels or spätzles with my beer."
"I made the spätzles that day."
"Yes, I know you did."
"I made the reibekuchen too, but of course you didn't want any of that."
"Do you want me to tell the story or do you want to talk about cooking?"
"No, no. I want you to tell the story. I want to hear the part where you see me for the first time."
"I'm getting to that. Now, let me see ..."
"You had just stepped into the pub."
"Yes. At the bar, there were some werkstudenten talking politics. No, I thought, this night is too pretty for politics. Then I noticed one of the regular customers of the bookstore at one of the tables, but he was sitting with a young fräulein. No, I said to myself; that can't be what the Fates have in store for me tonight. Then I spotted a table of five studenten sipping Turkish coffees in the corner. One of them was a lovely little Französin with a cigarette poised between her lips. Her eyes sparkled at me through the smoke as it swirled from the tip of her cigarette, encircling her head like a halo."
"Oh, you're exaggerating. That was Carolin and you know she's a lesbisch."
"Well, I didn't know that at the time. Even so, she's very sexy, you know. She wore red lipstick. Very French."
"Just get on with the story."
"Yes, well, they happened to have a lot of books of poetry stacked on their table and I thought to myself that this could be promising, so I sat down at a table next to them."
"And then?"
"And then, just as the sexy, red-lipped poetess --"
"Lesbisch poetess."
"-- drew the cigarette from her lips, I looked toward the bar and waved to the buefettier for a beer. Then suddenly, everything in the room seemed to blend into the smoke, and like Venus rising up on the half-shell, the air cleared and there appeared the most beautiful goettin I had ever seen."
"That was me."
"Yes, that was you. Your hair was pulled back in a pony tail and just as I saw you, you reached behind your head and pulled off the ribbon that tied it up. Your long, smooth, blue-black hair shimmered like a bolt of satin unrolling."
"And you knew right then."
"And I knew right then. I said to myself: 'That is my wife.'"

I turned my face toward his. "I adore you."

I still remember his face.

"And I, you." He kissed me. "And now, you better get going or you'll miss the S-Bahn."

I got up to leave.

"When I go to the market today, I'm going to get you a pineapple. They come all the way from the Hawaiian Islands. Hawaii is part of America now, you know."
"Yes, I heard."
"Maybe we could go live in America instead of London. And we can eat pineapples every day." I blew him a kiss as I spun out the door.

And with that, I was gone.

I finished my lunch shift at three o'clock that day and hurried out to the market. I had to be back at the restaurant by four to help set up for dinner. It was going to be busy night. There were lots of reservations. Edward R. Murrow, the famous American journalist, was coming in that night. Journalists were everywhere in West Berlin and they were very good tippers. Especially the Americans because in America, everyone is rich.

I used to imagine that one day, after Lukas finished his book - he was writing a book, you see - well, I used to imagine that I would bring his manuscript with me to work and give it to one of the American journalists who would see right away that it was brilliant and take it with him to an American publisher. They were always so nice, those American journalists. When that happened, we would be ready. I would convince Nana go with us. We would all become rich Americans, drink Coca-Colas and drive around in a big blue American convertible car. And Lukas and I would have lots of American babies.

Yes, well ...

The restaurant was busy that night. It was after 1:00 a.m. when I finally untied my apron.

I stepped out onto the sidewalk into the warm night air. It was so warm that night. The sparkling new buildings of West Berlin stretched high into the black, starless sky as if they were ladders into heaven. Westerners called them skyscrapers, but I didn't much like the word. I always thought they should have a prettier name; a name that captured the feeling I got when I looked up at them. I remember that night trying to imagine what Lukas would think of them; what his eyes would look like the first time he would see them.

Then the very next instant, a chilling sadness washed over me. He suddenly felt so far away and I wished I had never seen any those things until he could see them with me.

I made my way to the S-Bahn station. As I drew closer, I sensed something odd. Something was wrong. I quickened my pace. Not knowing why I was suddenly afraid made the fear burst inside me, as a glass would shatter if filled quickly with too hot a liquid.

Too many people were running about the station; many were crying out. Some were shouting. Others were pacing and wringing their hands.

I called out to a young man across the street as he tried to hail a taxi: "What's going on? What's happening?"

"The boarder's been closed!" he said. "The Trapos aren't allowing anyone in or out of East Berlin!" I fought to get closer to the man in order to hear what he was saying, believing that I could not possibly be hearing him correctly.

"What? How do we get across the sector boarder then?" I shouted.

"You can't!" He shouted back. A taxi pulled up and the man reached for the door handle.

"Wait! We can still walk across, can't we?"

"No! A barbed wire barrier is going up all around East Berlin! The vopos will shoot anyone who tries to get through!" He ducked inside the car. I whirled around searching for someone else who could make sense of what was happening.

"It can't be true! I just came across the boarder this morning!" I was surrounded by a whirlpool of people, fighting to find someone who would just stop ... for just a moment.

It was dawn before I sat down on a bench, exhausted. I was dazed; my face was swollen from weeping. I just sat there, motionless, hopeless. Somewhere from inside the crowd someone was calling me, but I didn't recognize ... I couldn't quite understand the sound of my name. Then, a thrill shot through me.

"Lukas? Lukas!" I didn't stop to reason.

"Rebekka?" Alexa was pushing her way through the crowd toward me. I saw her across the platform. There was no Lukas. I dissolved into a handful of ashes. Alexa ran to me and wrapped her arms around me pulling me out of the crowd. I felt as though I was being swept into a dustbin.

"The phone lines have been cut, Alexa. I can't reach Lukas."
"It can't last, 'Bekka. Don't worry."
"They've made a prison camp out of the whole city. How much more can they do to us?"
"Stay with me at my place until this all blows over. Come on, let's go. We can't do anything here."

In the first few days following "Barbed Wire Sunday," many people were shot trying to escape from East Berlin.

There was no way of learning their names.

I wondered every day if one of them could have been Lukas.

Every day I went down to The Wall, walking up and down, hoping that I would see Lukas through the netting, the living barricade of vopos and the rolls of barbed wire.

Ninety-six miles of it encompassed all of East Berlin in a crown of thorns.

"It won't last," Alexa kept telling me. "Remember the blockade of '48? The Americans came and put an end to it. It didn't last."
"Because it was the west that was blockaded," I said. "They came to help the west, not the east."

"They will come," she kept saying.

But of course they didn't come. No one came. Within days, great concrete slabs were hoisted in place, constructing an impenetrable wall in front of the wire. Like a giant serpent that snaked through the streets, stretching, and snarling, daring anyone to come close. With each section it came to life, a stone Mephistopheles with over three hundred watchtowers erected on its back where armed vopos hovered like black beetles ready to swarm anyone who dared to wake the sleeping monster.

The helplessness was excruciating.

On those countless days of futile desperation, I went walking next to The Wall, calling out Lukas's name. Others gathered, too, calling for their loved ones.

One day, there was a flurry of shouts from the other side, vopos were barking orders to halt. Hideous sirens joined in and shots, hundreds of them. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped. I couldn't breathe. All of us on the street, we stood there, staring at each other... none of us was breathing. We couldn't move, trapped in the moment, suffocating in silence. The cry of a wounded animal assailed The Wall. It was a young man, begging, pleading for help. The vopos had shot a student as he ran toward the wall, in a futile attempt to escape into the west. Now he lay bleeding, crying in agony. The vopos stood watching. Our collective voices erupted in singular outrage, shouting at vopos to let us help the boy, but the black uniforms stood without a word, daring us. Women burst into wailing. Men shook their fists, flailing around to find something to throw at the monsters behind The Wall. The young man dragged himself closer to us. We wanted to believe that he could reach us, that we could save him. The absurdity of it made us frantic. He reached the spire of barbed wire and pathetically tried to drag himself over it. For an hour he kept crying out to us and we kept shouting and sobbing and pleading until finally, he gave out.

And still the vopos did nothing. They let him lie there and die there, tangled in the steel thorns.

The screams and prayers from the crowd were deafening -- but God had stopped listening.

Weeks dragged on. Getting myself through each day was like plowing through earth made of hardened clay. I went to The Wall every day. Sometimes I would take balloons with me and slip rolled up notes into each one before releasing them into the air, on the chance that the breeze would carry them over and, somehow, they would find their way Lukas. Sometimes I put my notes in a bottle and took them to the river.

Months went by. Christmas, New Years, Easter. And still no word. Only deaths. Always more deaths.

One night the following August, I was at the end of a long shift. The restaurant was closed and empty except for Jonas, our busboy, and Helmut, the chef, and me. I was helping Jonas put the chairs on top of the tables. Helmut came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on his splattered apron. He had removed his chef's hat, leaving a sweaty red crease across his thick, fleshy forehead.

"You can leave now, Jonas," he said. "Be here in the morning at seven. We're cleaning the drains." Helmut picked up the hem of his apron and wiped his sweaty face with it.

I looked at Jonas, fixing my eyes to his, silently imploring him not to leave without me while directing my voice to Helmut. "My side work is finished, Helmut. Can you sign me out?" I asked.

"Yeah, sure," he said. "Get your timecard and make it snappy because I have a date tonight."

Jonas pretended to count the stacks of folded napkins while I ran back to get my timecard. Within minutes we were walking down the busy late night streets of what had by that time become the glistening cosmopolitan city of West Berlin, a showplace for western capitalism made whole and young again. The Faustian hero of the western world.

"What kind of woman would allow herself to be pawed by those greasy, cadaver smelling hands?" I cringed at the thought of it.
"The kind who gets paid in Westermarks, of course: Hilde, his old favorite."
"Isn't she the one who lives in Friedrichshain?" I asked.
"That's the one."
"But that's across the sector border."
"Dirnen make deals with the guards to let them pass over."
"He what?" I knew as soon as the words escaped that they were too conspicuous. Jonas didn't seem to notice, so I continued, but much more matter-of-factly. "Where do they come across, do you know?"
"Gustav said something about Checkpoint Charlie," he said. "Why?"

I was saved from answering. We had reached Alexa's apartment, so I quickly thanked him for walking me home and hurried up the steps. I rushed into the apartment and headed straight for the closet where I kept a box hidden in the corner. In it was all the cash I had been saving since Barbed Wire Sunday. I separated out three hundred pounds sterling and stuffed the rest into an envelope. Then I scrawled a note and slipped it into the envelope before hurrying out of the apartment.

Within moments I was at The Wall, at Checkpoint Charlie.

I had barely arrived when I heard footsteps coming and ducked into the shadows. It was Helmut, the red imprint across his forehead was still visible, his face was still sweaty. A woman in her late thirties, dressed in a tiny mini skirt, trotted up to him. Her blonde permed hair bounced in perfect unison with her barely contained breasts. Her stiletto heels clicked across the concrete like castanets. She threw her string bean arms around Helmut's thick neck and kissed his stubbled cheek leaving a smear of hot pink lipstick he didn't bother to wipe off. As they walked off together, Hilde turned back around and waved at three other women who had come through the gate with her. They were walking in my direction. When they got close to where I was hiding, I stepped out of the shadows.

"Please, fräulein -- " I said. My voice was surprisingly steady. One of the women turned and looked at me, obviously more accustomed to crossing than the other two. "I'll give you three hundred pounds sterling if you take this envelope to Lukas Schreiber in the Mitt District." It was a risk, of course. The envelope contained over a thousand Westmarks along with my letter. The woman might very well keep it for herself. But I was desperate and desperation offers few options.

Startled, the woman took a step back, but just then the moon came out from behind a cloud. Her eyes met mine. She looked at me for a long moment. She understood without my saying anything more.

"Yes. Give me the address," she said.

I was suddenly unable to speak. I fumbled a pen out of my pocket and wrote the address of both the apartment and the bookstore on the envelope.

"Meet me back here next Saturday," she said.

I nodded but before retreating back into the shadows, something came over me. I grabbed the woman's hand and kissed it.

The following Saturday, I arrived early. I waited. I paced back and forth for hours until finally the woman appeared.

"I'm sorry. There was no one living at the address you gave me," she said. "I went to the bookstore and it was boarded up." She handed the unopened envelope back to me. I stood staring at it for I don't know how long, unable to move. Of all the heartbreaks of those past months, this one was the most complete. Perhaps because it was the freshest of many. Perhaps because I had been so sure of a different result. I could feel my body hardening into stone. I couldn't take my eyes from the woman's lips as they formed around the words she spoke.

I reached out and tried to take the envelope. My arm was heavy; my fingers trembled. I knew that if I touched it, I would be touching the corpse of all my dead hopes. As I took the letter to my palm, I looked up to the stars and whispered to God: "you are dead to me now."

"What?" said the woman.

I just shook my head and turned to leave but then turned back around. "I don't even know your name."

"Amelie," she said.

"Thank you, Amalie."

November 9, 1989.

Rebekka stirred in her sleep before blinking her eyes open. Her focus blurred, still languishing in a fog of disorientation. It was cold. Under the covers, a wave rippled through her body stretching first her legs, then her arms, then lengthening her long slender fingers, made strong from years of typing for the Associated Press. It was almost noon, but she had to work late that night, so she could go in late. A press conference had been called by communist party leader, Gunter Shaboski but it was not to begin until seven o'clock that evening and he had a reputation for droning on for hours. He was going to brief the press about the meeting of the GDR Central Committee that was taking place that day at the Ministry of State Security.

This did not mean much to Rebekka. There was no such thing as hope in her anymore. It died that night at Checkpoint Charlie and she spent the next nine years mourning it, keeping her pain on display like a corpse laid out in a parlor at an interminable funeral. Then nine years later, in September of 1971, she buried it forever.

On September 3, 1971, the Four Power's Agreement and her journalist credentials made it possible for Rebekka to go into East Berlin for the first time in ten years. Driving through the Brandenberg Gate was like entering a porthole from Technicolor into film noir.

Her face blanched into the color of the ashen landscape that slowly moved past the window of her car. She gripped the steering wheel, trembling with grief. Her skin turned suddenly ice cold, though inside, her body torched like a furnace with horror, grief and rage.

The western side of the wall, the only side she had ever seen, was painted with graffiti and political cartoons.

But on the eastern side, The Wall had been painted bright white to illuminate anyone approaching it, making easy targets out of them. Searchlights constantly roamed like tireless fingers probing the gloom. Then came a wide expanse of concrete and an anti-tank trench. Then an electrified fence followed by a broad section of bleached white sand enabling the soldiers to track the footsteps of anyone entering the forbidden zone, the "No Man's Land" where those who tried to escape were picked off like flies. Behind that, a section of "Stalin grass," giant clusters of steel blades protruding from the ground that stood poised to impale any one who tried to run away.

Rebekka drove past the pub where on a June evening thirteen years ago she had been a goddess. The apartment building she lived in with Lukas had been ravaged by fire; soot stained the brick walls at the tops of the boarded up windows. Huge mounds of rubble still took up block after city block. Monumental buildings still showed their shell-shocked scars from The War as if they were fresh wounds.

She was restricted as to where she could go. She was able to learn only that her Nana had died, but not when she died nor what had killed her. She could get no access to any records or documentation. Lukas had disappeared without a trace.

That was eighteen years ago. Eighteen years. Twenty seven years since Barbed Wire Sunday. That didn't matter now, though; she no longer kept track of anniversaries.

She opened the medicine cabinet, removed her toothbrush, and then pushed it shut. Her reflection in the mirror arrested her. Her hair that had once been like a 'bolt of blue-black satin unrolling,' was now cut to her jaw line and graying at her temples. Her eyes, still bright green with lambent flicks of gold, had sunken deeper into their shadowed sockets. Her face, still soft, had lost the smooth firmness of youth. To the world, she was still a beauty, but hers was a beauty made faded and worn by years behind a death mask.
What does it matter, she thought.

She arrived fifteen minutes late to the press conference and quietly took her seat in the back of the room. True to form, Shaboski was long winded, talking on and on for almost an hour about travel regulations and other political rhetoric until a reporter stood up and asked,
"Mr. Shaboski, what about The Wall?" It was an old, tired question.

Shoboski, reading from hastily scribbled notes, casually replied, "Today, as far as I know, a decision has been made. We have decided to adopt the regulation which enables every citizen of the GDR to leave the country by way of the GDR boarder crossings."

A collective gasp silenced the room and, for a moment, stilled every movement. Excitement reclaimed it in an instant and pens started flying across legal pads. Many reporters rushed from the room to get to the nearest phones.

Soon hundreds, then thousands of East Berliners gathered at many of the checkpoints.

The boarder guards had evidently not been briefed of the new developments and stood by the gates -- but the tide of people was rising. By midnight huge crowds were shouting and chaos was looming.

By one a.m., West Berliners had heard the news and approached the other side of The Wall with sledge hammers, pipes and pick-axes.

Then it happened. The guards stood down. The dam burst; the gates were open. East Berliners rushed into the west; West Berliners rushed east. Strangers embraced in weeping, cheering, singing masses.

Rebekka had left the briefing and gone straight to her office to type up her report. Pulling the paper from the typewriter, she handed it to Mike who would take it to the editor. She walked over to the window overlooking the jubilant scene at the Brandenberg Gate in the distance below.

She stood empty, hallow. In a blink it was over - as it had begun. And in that space in between it had claimed everything in her worth having.

She put on her coat and wrapped a wool scarf around her neck. She stepped out onto the street among crowds of people running toward the Brandenberg Gate as if being sucked in to fill a suddenly unsealed vacuum of humanity. They rushed past, some bumping into her. She pulled her coat more tightly around her and turned up her collar. She intended to go straight home; she thought she was heading for home but she was drawn like the rest of them by the irresistible gravity of history toward The Wall. She stood in the middle of the street, the chaos swirling around her like whitewater around a rock. The roar of the crowd seemed to muffle and fade as sounds from the past echoed from within her:

"Rebekka!"

She closed her eyes to let the memory of the voice resonate within her.

"Rebekka!"

She kept her eyes closed, allowing the electrified mist to wrap around her as the rapture of the world outside seeped in through her pores, into an uncharted place inside her. Like a secret closet in a locked attic.

A man formed from the fog. He was dark and tall, though leaning heavily on the handle of a cane, gripping it with such strength his knuckles were white. He moved quickly through the crowd in spite of a leg he had to drag into every step, making his way toward her.

(all photos courtesy of Wiki Commons)

I am so grateful to those wonderful lensmasters who have so generously lent me a helping hand along the way and offered me so much encouragement.-- and now this treasured honor of a Purple Star. Thank you most sincerely