Damn you!
Adrienne almost said it aloud—to Kurt, not the Barkova woman. To his arched eyebrow—a not-so-subtle sign that he was flattered. To the same half-smile that he flashed at operating-room nurses and cocktail-party hostesses.
“Having fun?” she said acidly. Turning her back on them both, she laid out a colorful beach towel, sank into it, and closed her eyes.
The sun was a lightweight blanket on her body. Surrendering to its warmth, she shut out the world—tried to anyway. Her article was practically writing itself. Entire paragraphs darted in and out of her head. The only thing she’d dared reduce to writing were some memory-jogging words that would be meaningless to anyone else. Photographs were more accurate than memory—and much more incriminating, she consoled herself. If only she could manage to take the ones she really wanted. Lugging a conspicuously large camera around for the few photos she was allowed to take was a nuisance. On the other hand, she had to admit it was a terrific distraction on the rare occasion when she could whip the tiny Minox out of her shoulder bag and snap away.
She let it all go finally and surrendered to the delicious warmth of her sun-blanket.
Until she felt the blanket slip away, as if some presumptuous cloud had crossed the almost cloudless sky. Turning lazily on her side, she reached with half-closed eyes for the terrycloth robe she’d dropped next to her towel.
Her arm stalled in mid-air as if someone had grabbed it.
Kiril Andreyev stood looking down at her. His shadow across her body had blotted out the sun.
She felt the weight of his glance. Her own tight breathing. The shock of seeing his body outside the prison of an ill-fitting suit.
Even her eyes betrayed her. She couldn’t take them off his hands as they reached for a towel. The insolent line of his legs, braced against the hard-driving wind. She was aware of the curve of her hip. Of a bathing suit that rose obediently to her neck but left her shoulders and back exposed—
The shadow ruptured like broken glass. He had turned to respond to something Kurt was saying.
She dropped back onto the towel and closed her eyes, feeling cold even though the sun was back.
When the helicopter was ready to board the passengers for the flight back, everyone resumed the seats they’d occupied before. Takeoff was uneventful.
As soon as the aircraft reached the altitude for horizontal flight, Kiril addressed the Brenners. “Before we took off, I instructed the captain to fly as low as possible as we approach East Berlin. I thought you might like to see East Germany’s newest attempt at improving its security against ‘capitalist encroachment’ on its sovereignty.”
Adrienne Brenner went into high alert, immediately grasping what Andreyev was getting at. Convinced that there was a subtext to everything he said and did, and given the worldwide headlines a month or so earlier about East Germany’s newest attempt to “improve its security,” he had to be talking about The Wall.
Before leaving New York, she had learned as much as she could about what was happening. Then on August 12, 1961, just a few weeks before she and Kurt set foot on East German soil, the Council of Ministers of the GDR had put out a patently self-serving and facially absurd statement.
“I know what you’re talking about,” she told Andreyev as she flipped to a page in her notebook. She paraphrased the Council of Ministers’ statement. How, in order to put a stop to the “hostile” activity of West Germany’s and West Berlin’s “attempt to regain lost territory and militaristic forces,” border controls of the kind generally found in every sovereign state would be set up at the border of the German Democratic Republic. Adrienne looked up from her notes. “What prompted the creation of those so-called border controls, Dr. Andreyev?”
“Mind changing seats with me for a few minutes?” Kiril asked Brenner. “It will make it easier for me to answer your wife’s questions.”
Brenner shrugged indifferently and took the seat next to Galya.
“Five years after the end of World War II—between 1950 and 1953—nearly one million citizens of the GDP’s workers’ paradise moved to West Germany. As the American saying goes, they voted with their feet. A quarter-million left within the first six months.”
Adrienne scanned her notes. “A million people in three years,” she said evenly. “How long did this go on?”
“A few more years. In 1957 the Communists imposed a passport law severely reducing the number of people leaving East Germany. Ironically, it was as if pressure applied to one end of a balloon forced the other end to bulge. By the end of 1958, the percentage of refugees using West Berlin as an escape hatch rose from sixty to ninety percent. And don’t forget, the subway was still running between East and West Berlin.”
“All defectors had to do was take a subway?”
He nodded, almost as if he couldn’t trust his voice. But Adrienne saw in his expression what he was unable to hide: a terrible sense of longing.
“How many people escaped?” she asked.
“By the end of 1961? Three and a half million East Germans—20 percent of the population. And because most of them were young and well-educated—physicians, teachers, engineers, skilled workers—some party officials were calling it a ‘brain drain.’ It got so bad that by 1960, only 61 per cent of East Germany’s population was of working age. It was obvious that the combined efforts of East Germany and the Soviet Union were needed to avert a crisis.”
“Are you telling me this combined effort has already begun?!”
“Several weeks ago. At midnight on August 12 to 13. East German Vopos and soldiers began to close the East to West Berlin border. Streets running parallel to the border were torn up. Barbed wire was strung. Four days later, the regime began to lay large concrete blocks. Guards were ordered to shoot anyone attempting to cross the border. According to Soviet intelligence, all of East Germany and East Berlin will in time be entirely sealed off from the West.”
“How exactly?”
“With chain fences. Concrete walls. Minefields in a no-man’s-land ‘death zone’ between what will later become two walls parallel to each other and snaking for miles. Vicious guard dogs will be caged and released to find and kill people trying to escape.”
“People whose only crime is wanting to be free,” she whispered.
“The entire East German population will be caged in,” he told her. “Family members will be sealed off from one another.”
Reaching for the wall telephone, he told Rolf Gruner in German to get as low as he could over what Kiril thought of as the early stages of The Wall’s construction.
“I’ll do my best,” Gruner replied after a moment’s hesitation. “But I can’t enter West German airspace and I sure as hell don’t relish getting shot down in the East.”
“Thanks,” Kiril said as Gruner swung as close as he dared to the East Berlin side of the wall. He translated for the others, making sure Kurt Brenner, as well as his wife, heard him loud and clear.
Adrienne had stopped taking notes. Pressing her face to the large window next to her seat, she followed the helicopter’s trajectory—treetop level. Her face felt oddly still… like a wax dummy’s. She zeroed in on the smooth gray of concrete. The grainy unevenness of cement. The still-intact wall of some forgotten home. An unbroken series of bricked-up doors and windows. She shivered as a bright gold speck signaled malevolently—the sun’s reflection caught and held by razor-sharp glass shards all along the top. Like a sewing machine needle on a band of retreating fabric, her eyes drilled down the wall. She spotted a roller device—lengths of pipe atop the wall that forged a path through the broken glass so that anyone groping desperately for a handhold would slip. Between the pipes she saw metal poles with outspread arms, taut wires stretching from one pole to the next. Electrified? she wondered, closing her eyes as she stifled the urge to weep for its future victims.