Katja’s Wall

“It’s a boy this time,” said Eva as she came inside from the backyard after hanging out the washing. She sank her middle-aged, rotund body down at the kitchen table opposite her husband Martin, who put down his paper and spectacles to listen. Eva looked anxious, and the lines on her strong face seemed to have grown deeper.

“His name was Peter Fechter. A bricklayer. He was shot and left to bleed to death. Hundreds of witnesses watched it, including those bloody border guards, and no one moved a finger to help him, not even after hearing him scream.”

They took a moment to reflect in silence. Perhaps this would lead to action and an uprising by the people which might make the leaders listen. However, that seemed doubtful. No one had listened to poor people like them before, so why should anything change now.

“This bloody wall. What a strange and tragic thing it is!” said Martin, shaking his head. “It strangles the life out of you. And I don’t have much life to spare as it is. That’s why it’s frail people like us who live close to that damn monstrosity. They know we don’t have it in us to escape, even if we wanted to. We’re too old, too weak, and too useless.”

“Please, Martin, not so loud, the children may hear …”

Eva shot a sharp glance to the living room where their grandchildren were playing with their toys. Since the boy and girl’s parents had been shot trying to escape over the wall, they now lived with Eva and Martin.

Martin had only just put his spectacles back on to read his paper, when Katja wandered into the room, still holding her doll.

“Someone else has been shot, haven’t they?” she asked, looking at her grandparents.

“No,” Eva lied.

“Yes they have. His name was Peter. I heard you. When did it happen? Was it today? How did—”

“Please,” Martin shouted. “Now go along and I will call you when dinner is ready.”

Katja shuffled off to the lounge room where her brother Peter was playing with his toy soldiers. She dreamed of escaping this small, dark house that was too small for its occupants; a pair of shrunken old people and two sad children. But whenever she thought of leaving, the wall rose up like a wave from her tiny bedroom window to crush her. Every night she fell asleep under its shadow, and every day she woke beneath it. Sometimes she went outside to marvel at it. No matter how hard she tried she could never see the end of it. It marched on and on without end. And then there were the guards who defended it, walking along the death strip. It wasn’t true, Katja thought, that these men with their rifles slung over their shoulders were all monsters. Once one had thrown her a chocolate bar over the coiled barbed wire. He smiled and kept walking, which was all he ever seemed to do. And there were the watchtowers, and the sweeping searchlights that reminded her of ships at sea that she had read about in the books her grandparents gave her.

Katja was too young to remember the day the wall was built, first with barbed wire, and then, as if to seal a point, with bricks and mortar. Apparently one night the streetlights went out and everything fell silent. By the next morning, everyone knew about the wall. Over time it would follow them wherever they went, even if it was physically distant from them. The mind’s eye, Katja realised, sees everything.

Katja hadn’t given up hope completely. She heard the stories the government tried to conceal. She couldn’t be sure if these were myths and daydreams or were real. One group of people she had heard about had used scraps of clothing to build a hot-air balloon, which they flew over the wall. Others had dug escape tunnels from basements that had been used for air-raid shelters from falling bombs years before.

When Katja lay down to sleep that night, she thought of the young man who had been shot by the guards and left to perish in his blood. Even at that young age, the surrealism of the event did not escape her. She saw the young man screaming. And she imagined the guards who did not react in one way or the other. They did not put him out of his misery, and nor did they assist him. They simply stood and watched him fade away in the beautiful sunlight that often drifts over the city.

As the years went by, Katja tried hard to accept the wall but realised she could not do so. It was the wall that prevented her grandparents from keeping their jobs, and reduced them to even worse poverty. It was the wall that separated her from the cousins she had never seen. It was the wall that had killed her parents. And time, that so often destroys that which it creates, only strengthened the wall, with concrete slabs, strong as tombs, that fitted nicely between steel girders and concrete posts.

For years Katja bore the brunt of the wall’s unnaturalness, and its mythological presence. Beneath the weight of its shadow, she nursed her grandparents to the grave. When Eva died, Martin also perished, if only in spirit. Some days he would not talk at all. Many times Katja had to drag him from his bed and force him to eat. It was like living with a corpse. Often he would play with his shit and she would have to clean it up, and put him to bed and calm him from the hallucinations that haunted him. Sometimes she hated him. She hated him for chaining her to this god-awful hovel and this lonely life. And as for her brother Peter, he was all but lost to his anger and depression. He was always drunk with his friends, who Katja hated. “Those bastards will be the death of you,” she warned him. And as it turned out, she was right. His friends and he were shot when they got drunk one night and tried to escape. It happened a year before the wall came down.

At the time of the collapse Katja was perplexed by a sea of emotions that stirred up everything old in her and everything alien at once. She felt euphoric that she was free at last. But she realised she had gone through so much pain which the collapse of the wall seemed to make meaningless. One day the wall was there, and then it wasn’t.

The final absurdity came one winter’s day when she heard a knock at her front door just before lunchtime. Katja had just come in from hanging up the washing in the backyard. She frowned, for she seldom had visitors. She had no real friends. Having to care for her grandfather in that ugly little house for all those years had seen to that.

Living in solitude had made Katja shy. She composed herself and answered the door. Standing on the step was a heavily built grey-haired man in a black overcoat. He wore a fedora hat and he held a black leather case that looked very new and polished.

“Ms Scholz. My name is Marcus Huber. I’m here on behalf of Wolfgang real estate. You may have heard of us,” said the stranger, handing her his business card. “I am not here to sell you anything—I promise. I only want a few minutes of your time, if that is possible. Would that be okay?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

He removed his hat and stepped inside. Katja closed the door behind him, but not before she let in a powerful draft of cold air. They made their way to the lounge room.

“Would you like water or coffee? I’ve run out of tea.”

Marcus looked at the small, pale, middle-aged woman in front of him, with the generic face and hunched shoulders. She still had all her red hair, but it was thinning. Her limbs were slender, but strong. He noticed three black-and-white photos on the tiny coffee table showing a pair of old people with a little girl that must have been Katja. The photo beside it was of a young man who looked a lot like Katja. Marcus surmised this must be her brother.

“Water will be fine, thank you,” he said, leaning forward in the armchair, resting his hands on his knees. Katja went into the kitchen, and returned with his glass of water. She drank hers in private by the kitchen sink, gazing out to where the wall used to be.

“So what is this about, Mr …”

“Mr Huber. But you can call me Marcus. Now what I have here is a letter from my boss, if you would care to read it.”

Katja read it carefully. Marcus leaned back in his seat and looked around at the small, modest room with its dirty peeling walls and cracked ceiling. Then he spoke in his polite, but slightly impatient voice.

“Who would have thought it? For so long this mean little house sat beside that terrible wall. Nobody in their right mind would think anything good could come from it. Yet all this time you were sitting on a goldmine. This area is now prime real estate, Ms Scholz. You’ll never have to worry about running out of tea ever again …”