UNDER THE WALL by Jacob Strunk

UNDER THE WALL by Jacob Strunk

Young man! Hallo! You are American, yes? Oh, you’re easy to spot, all right. Please, sit down. Have a drink on me. You’d like a beer? Ein Diesel, Frank. Please, please, bitte. I’ve seen you three times this week, always alone with your book. So serious! Please, drink. Talk to an old man. Yes, you like it? Dark beer and cola. Good for these warm nights. Prost! How is your Deutsch?

Yes, in England for nearly twenty years. I’m sure you’ve already learned that Berlin is a terrible place to learn German. It’s easier for us to speak to you in your English, and requires less patience. Ha! You’ve taken a flat on Gaudystrasse. Like I said, you are easy to spot, and when you get to my age, there’s not much to do but watch the people pass by and bore them with reminiscences. I was born not far from here, and I’ve lived many years in Prenzlauer Berg. Oh, yes, unspeakably different then. My boy, where we sit now on this beautiful evening was a cold, dark place, colorless, and I grew up in the rubble from the war. Yes, yes, the Wall. You are likely too young to remember the fall, but you read about it in school, I think. You’ve heard the David Bowie song, saw the video of David Hasselhoff. I was not! We were in London then.

Well, since you asked—and don’t say you weren’t warned!—it happened right around the corner, not far from your Gaudystrasse flat. I can tell you our homes weren’t as cozy as they are now, but we worked hard to make them so. My wife and I lived just a couple blocks from here. Yes, she was—what do you say in America?— she was quite a looker. We were young when the Wall went up. I was twenty, and she was eighteen. We’d just been married that July. When I tell you it happened overnight, you must believe me. Every word of this story is true, though you won’t want to believe it. We went to bed one night, business as usual, and we woke the next day to checkpoints, to razor sharp wire, to the sound of machines lifting concrete slabs into place.

Well, yes, it was awful! Cut off the from the world, from our families, from our jobs. We had friends in the west, lives. And just like that, we were sealed in. My boy, it was like a tomb, a tomb big enough to fit all of our dreams, all the hopes we had for our lives. Buried in the ground. We’d dreamed of children, as all young couples do, but Elsa’s family was on the other side of the Wall, and she could no longer imagine a life with children, with laughter. She fell into such a state, and so she remained for years. Always a reader, a bright mind, she was assigned work as a seamstress. I worked as a clerk. And so it was for many years for us, all of us. Everyone knew people who disappeared, never arrived to work or returned a call, their flats emptied in the night. No letters or calls, no warnings. The information, the press, it was all controlled. You never knew what to believe.

Oh, I’ll get to that. Don’t you worry. Yes, it’s good, isn’t it? Another? Of course! Frank! Zweimal, bitte!

My brother Karl first mentioned to me the tunnel in 1976. He called me down to the street, asked me to come with him. He said he needed my help moving a wardrobe. Now, I knew right away something was wrong, because Karl didn’t have a wardrobe. He lived alone, his wife having taken ill and died in—oh, it must have been 1968 or 1969. He didn’t remarry, he lived very simply then, and I’d never known him to have much use for anything as elaborate as a wardrobe in the one room flat he kept on Christinenstrasse.

I followed Karl down Shönhauser Alee to a public house, not unlike this one where we sit now, past the bartender with a nod, and into a back room. There were no windows, and the air was thick with cigarette smoke. I never smoked because of my asthma. There were two other men in the room, each with a beer, and Karl closed and latched the door behind us. Karl lit his own cigarette, the three men leaned in close, and that’s when they told me about the tunnel.

The two of them had begun planning a month or two before this, it seemed, with the help of a friend on the other side who was granted permission to cross over to East Berlin twice each week to deliver bread and canned goods. They had found a building they thought would work, an abandoned row house, uninhabited since the war, with a shallow earthen cellar. It was fifty yards from the Wall, a straight shot to a bombed-out warehouse on the other side where sympathetic westerners were eager to help, right at the end of your block where the park is now. Yes, Mauer Park, with its beer gardens and suntanning women!

We all knew about the tunnels, of course, and that included the Stasi. You know what I mean, the secret police? Why, just the week before they’d raided a tunnel not a mile north of here and arrested the three young conspirators in the act of digging. They’d almost broken through. My boy, they were mere feet from freedom! Yes, terrible. No, I don’t know what happened to them, but likely they were sent to a work camp, and their fates were never relayed to those of us still here. No one’s were. Well, these two men had approached Karl for his help, knowing he did not have a family, and Karl had brought me. And now, for better or worse, we were all conspirators. In 1976, young man, this could be a crime punishable by death. Or worse.

We worked at night, digging in shifts. Two in the tunnel, and two standing watch. It was my third shift on watch that I first heard it. A howling, but not like any animal I’d heard before or since. Ha! Yes, I see your look. Incredulous, you Americans would say. But I told you every word of this story is true, whether you choose to believe it or not. The nights then were quiet, desolate, and the Stasi had microphones buried all along the Wall, listening for the sounds of the tunnels. We were as quiet as we could be, and it was cold that night. November, this was, or maybe early December. Not yet Christmas. The others would sit by the window in the dark, carefully concealing their cigarettes. But I didn’t smoke. And this night, I decided to step outside, just a few minutes, to stretch my legs, cramped from my hours working a trowel and bucket in the hole.

The howl seemed at first to come from all around me, filling the empty streets, bouncing off the battered buildings, most of them empty. My blood went cold, I tell you, and I froze with fear. What on earth could make such an unearthly wail here in the city? Something escaped from a zoo, I thought, or a family’s dog gone rabid. But I heard it again, long and mournful. The moon was bright and full that night, but I saw nothing. No movement, not man or beast, and I hastened back inside and into the empty flat with the trap door to the cellar.

Karl, I whispered to my brother, dozing on a low mattress in the corner. Karl, there is something outside. An animal. But he dismissed me. I stayed at the window, low to the floor, my eyes peering over the sill until just before dawn, when Heinrich and Markus raised themselves up through the trapdoor, exhausted, and we silently packed our things and left for the night, sliding the old mattress and some broken crates over the entrance to the cellar. I didn’t mention the howl to anyone, not Heinrich or Markus, not Elsa, who was waiting up when I returned home with tea and sausages, as she always did on nights we dug.

The work continued through December, and by the new year it seemed we were close to breaking through. Progress reports were passed in secret on the bread truck. Plans were made. We knew then we had to be more careful than ever. If we were discovered, well, you can imagine. Like I told you before, lots of people disappeared in those days, and everyone knew better than to ask too many questions. Elsa managed to get word to her parents on the bread truck, and suddenly everything was happening.

Here now, I must pause to use—I believe you’d say in America—the pisser. One more round, yes? You’ll order it for an old man who may take more time to squeeze it out than you’re used to. And one more for yourself, bitte.

Apologies for the delay, dear boy. It’s not as easy as it once was. Ah, yes, another waiting for me. Jawohl! Now, I was… yes, of course. It was Heinrich’s idea to leave the night we did, early in January when the moon was once again full and bright and high in the sky. We suggested, I suggested we wait for the new moon or the next winter storm, that our chances were better under cover of darkness. But Elsa agreed with Heinrich, so desperate was she to leave Berlin, to leave Germany, and reclaim her chance at a life.

And so we gathered that night at midnight, each of us sneaking down Gaudystrasse, past your very window, I’m sure. Karl was already there when Elsa and I arrived. And Markus followed close behind. But no one had seen Heinrich, nor spoken to him. Fearing the worst, we weighed our options. Again it was Elsa who persisted. She dropped into the darkness of the tunnel, fearless, so quickly we hadn’t even a chance to turn on the electric lights we’d wired along the entire length. I switched them on and crawled into the tunnel behind her, beckoning Karl to follow.

It was then, crouched in the tunnel entrance, that I heard the howl through the broken windows. It filled the building, seeming to occupy every room and stairwell, loud enough that I could feel the chill call in my bones. Markus and Karl looked at each other, then at me. But we barely had time to whisper before the door burst in, splintering and filling the room with terror. My boy! I thought surely this was it, that all my days had led to this moment in which I’d be torn to pieces by some foul beast from a hell I didn’t believe in and couldn’t imagine.

It was a beast from hell, that’s true, ja, but no animal. Heavy black boots stomped into the room in a blaze of bright light, and from the doorway tumbled poor Heinrich, beaten to a state I’d never before seen a man. One glazed eye looked at us dimly, helplessly. The other was swollen shut. His nose and jaw were broken. One of his arms fell limply at his side, dislocated. Above him towered three men in grey uniforms, drab but for the wash of blood on their cuffs and lapels. The moment seems frozen to me even now, my boy, all these decades later. So clear is it, I can almost now smell Heinrich’s blood and sick, hear him choking on it there on the floor.

Markus screamed something, what I do not recall, and here everything speeds back up. It’s fragments, you see. Markus screaming, charging, meeting the butt of a gun.

Calling for Karl, I lowered myself into the tunnel. I could see Elsa far beyond me, almost to the other side, already under the Wall, past it, almost free. If we could just make it a little further. I crawled toward her, calling again for Karl. Behind me I heard the Stasi shouting orders, heard Markus cursing them. I heard Karl drop into the tunnel’s entrance behind me, call my name. I heard a gunshot. Two. And then Markus was silent. And then—

Let me take a moment, take a drink. I haven’t told this story in many years, but even now… Let me just have a drink. What I describe to you now will seem unbelievable, yes. But look into my eyes as I speak and know it is true.

From the room behind us came then a sound I still hear in my nightmares. It was a snarl, a roar, but not of any dog I’d ever heard, nor any bears from the Bärenzwinger in Köllnischer Park. It was hunger I heard. And rage. And then the screams started, sounds I’d never known a man to make, and the wet crack of bones. I could hear the men, the Stasi, being torn like paper. I didn’t dare turn to look behind me then. Ahead of me, yes, I saw Elsa in a halo of light. She’d broken through! And then I saw her pulled up and out. Ahead popped down, a man I’d never seen, who held a torch—excuse me, a flashlight. He beckoned at me to come, schnell! I crawled forward as fast as I could.

And then another scream behind me did make me pause. It was Karl I heard. But he shouted at me to go on, keep crawling. And I did. I was greeted at the other side—the free side—by two men. They pulled me up. Elsa was sitting in the corner of the well-let room, her eyes wide, her arms wrapped around her legs, which were pulled to her chest. Was ist das?! one of the men shouted while the other moved to cover the hole in the floor they’d prepared for our breaking through.

Nein! I said, my hands on the man’s shoulders. My brother, I said, my brother is still down there. I took the torch and dropped to my knees, leaning forward into the hole. Karl was close, but moving slowly and wincing with great pain. I reached forward and grabbed hold of his arms, pulling with all my might. The two west Germans grabbed my belt and pulled both of us up, dragging me across the dusty floor until Karl himself rolled free of the hole and I saw for the first time the oozing wound on his leg. He put his hands on it, squeezing, and blood poured out between his fingers. Elsa went to him. She unbuckled his belt, pulled it free from around his waist. I could see now the tears streaming from his eyes as Elsa wrapped the belt tightly around his leg. Three long gashes ran down his calf, so deep as to be black. Steam rose from the wound, from where his blood pooled on the floor beneath him.

But young man, I had to know. And so I turned from my brother, from my wife, from the two men who’d risked their lives to free ours, and I once more leaned into the freezing darkness of the tunnel and peered back to the east, under the Wall. At the other end, I could just make out something in the far entrance of the tunnel, something blocking almost all the light there. I shined the flashlight and—on my life—saw two eyes looking at me, glowing in the reflected light a deep green. Like nothing I’d ever seen. It was… they were beautiful. And then, just as quickly, they were gone, and the hulking shape moved away from the tunnel’s entrance, and then I heard —we all heard—the screams again.

We hoisted Karl up, his arms draped over our shoulders, and shuffled out of the room, down a short hall, and out a door into the bright, moonlit night in West Berlin. A car idled at the curb, and we took our first steps toward it— toward redemption. And then a volley of gunfire erupted from the east. Not from the tunnel, that black mouth we’d left to gape in the decrepit warehouse, but from over the Wall, from the building we’d entered from the street and left through the ground. We all turned, and we saw the flashing lights, heard the wail of sirens. Even here, the calls of the Stasi carried on the still winter air and knew they were storming the building.

And then the strangest thing yet happened, if you can believe it. I felt Karl’s weight lift from my shoulder, and when I turned to him, he was gazing not toward the Wall as we were, but up.At the moon, full and white as a saucer in the black sky.And he took a step back, away from us, then another. He looked at me, and his eyes seemed bright in the night. Elsa was already at the car, our two new friends with her, and I held my hand out to Karl. Jetzt, Karl. Wir mussen —

But then he was gone, running back toward the building. The belt Elsa tied around his leg popped and dropped to the ground, its buckling clanging on the concrete. And as Karl entered the warehouse again, for the last time, he turned to me and held up a hand I could see was turning into something else. He disappeared into the building. I got into the backseat of the car with Elsa, and it pulled away from the curb. We didn’t look back. We never looked back.

I see your hand tremble as you light your cigarette. No, please do. I have never smoked, but I like the smell. It carries memories. Elsa’s parents had arranged papers for us, and travel through the American sector to a train that would take us through Belgium, then onto a ship. We were met upon landing in England by Elsa’s distant cousin, Brock, and his wife Maris, who brought us to their home, where we stayed for six months. I found work doing the books at a foundry, while Elsa pursued her studies and eventually gained a professorship. And yes, I can see now you want to ask, we did have a daughter. She is there now, still, with her husband, her own children grown. But she comes to visit me when she can, and I do enjoy the Christmas holiday in London when I’m able.

Elsa never set foot in Germany again. I stayed for a while after she died, but eventually my country called to me. I could scarcely believe it when I stepped off the airplane. How vibrant, I thought, how colorful!And here I am, an old man at his favorite bar, telling stories, boring young men with lives left to lead. Ha! That’s how it should be, don’t you think? We have a word in German, Weltschmerz. You’ve heard it? For a long time, I let that fill my heart. It’s hard to think of the friends we left behind, those who disappeared before us. But I suppose we, too, left in the night without a trace, and we were lucky to write our own story, Elsa and I. It brings me joy to tell it.

Ah! It’s late for an old man. I best get back before these catch up with me and I fall asleep here in Frank’s bar. I don’t have the endurance I used to, the endurance of a young man like you! You’re writing your own story, aren’t you, here in Berlin.And I hope you’ll tell it to me. Maybe right here at this table! But another time. Now I must be going. The sun is gone. The moon is high.

One more trip to the pisser for me, and then I believe I will walk home the long way, through the park.

Jacob Strunk has been short-listed for both a Student Academy Award and the Pushcart Prize in fiction, as well as the Glimmer Train short story award and a New Rivers Press book prize. His films have screened in competition and by invitation across the world, and his genre-bending fiction has appeared in print for over twenty years, most recently in Coffin Bell, Five on the Fifth, and his collection Screaming in Tongues, published in 2023. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and teaches film and media in Los Angeles, where he lives with a few framed movie posters and the ghost of his cat, Stephen.