Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [9]
The whole strip was lit by a row of huge street lamps on poles, their heads bent in submission at exactly the same angle. Overhead, fireworks had started to fizz and pop for the New Year. The Bornholmer Bridge was about a hundred and fifty metres away. Between her and the west there was a wire mesh fence, a patrol strip, a barbed-wire fence, a twenty-metre-wide asphalt street for the personnel carriers and a footpath. Then the eastern sentry huts stretched out about one hundred metres apart, and behind them more barbed wire. Miriam takes a piece of paper and draws me a mess of lines so I can see it too.
‘Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.’ If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.
I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people’s sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking about in Beatrix Potter’s garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified borders on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.
She says suddenly, ‘I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can’t see them so well now.’ She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scars, each about a centimetre long.
The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top. ‘The strange thing is, you know how the barbed wire used to be looped in a sort of tube along the top of the fence? My pants were all ripped up and I got caught—stuck on the roll! I just hung there! I cannot believe noone saw me.’ A Pierrot doll hanging on display.
Miriam must have come unstuck, because next she got down on all fours and started her way across the path, across the wide street, and across the next strip. The whole area was lit as bright as day. ‘I just got down on my knees and went for it. But I was careful. I was very slow.’ After the footpath she crossed the wide asphalt road. She could not feel her body, she was invisible. She was nothing but nerve endings and fear.
Why didn’t they come for her? What were they doing?
She reached the end of the asphalt and they still hadn’t come. There was a cable suspended about a metre off the ground. She stopped. ‘I had seen it from my ladder. I thought it might be some sort of alarm or something, so I went down flat on my belly underneath.’ She crawled across the last stretch to a kink in the wall and crouched and looked and did not breathe. ‘I stayed there. I was waiting to see what would happen. I just stared.’ She thought her eyes would come loose from her skull. Where were they?
Something shifted, right near her. It was a dog. The huge german shepherd pointed himself in her direction. That cable was no alarm: it had dogs chained to it. She could not move. The dog did not move. She thought the guards’ eyes would follow the pointing dog to her. She waited for him to bark. If she moved away, along the wall, he would go for her.
‘I don’t know why it didn’t attack me. I don’t know how dogs see, but maybe it had been trained to attack moving targets, people running across, and I’d gone on all fours. Maybe it thought I was another dog.’ They held each other’s gaze for what seemed a long time. Then a train went by, and, unusually, it was a steam train. The two of them were covered in a fine mist.
‘Perhaps then he lost my scent?’ Eventually, the dog walked away. Miriam waited another long time. ‘I thought he would come back for me, but