She walked briskly, threading through the streets of the old city centre. She passed the sprawling campus of the Charité Hospital and turned on to Invaliden Strasse. To her left was the Sandkrug Bridge, which carried traffic over the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal to West Berlin.
Except that today it did not.
At first Rebecca was not sure what she was looking at. There was a line of cars that stopped short of the bridge. Beyond the cars, a crowd of people stood looking at something. Perhaps there had been a crash on the bridge. But to her right, in the Platz vor dem Neuen Tor, twenty or thirty East German soldiers stood around doing nothing. Behind them were two Soviet tanks.
It was puzzling and frightening.
She pushed through the crowd. Now she could see the problem. A crude barbed-wire fence had been erected across the near end of the bridge. A small gap in the fence was manned by police who seemed to be refusing to let anyone through.
Rebecca was tempted to ask what was going on, but she did not want to draw attention to herself. She was not far from Friedrich Strasse Station: from there she could go by subway directly to Marienfelde.
She turned south, walking faster now, and took a zigzag course around a series of university buildings to the station.
There was something wrong here, too.
Several dozen people were crowded around the entrance. Rebecca fought her way to the front and read a notice pasted to the wall that said only what was obvious: the station was closed. At the top of the steps, a line of police with guns formed a barrier. No one was being admitted to the platforms.
Rebecca began to be fearful. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the first two crossing places she had chosen were blocked. And perhaps not.
There were eighty-one places where people could cross from East to West Berlin. The next nearest was the Brandenburg Gate, where the broad Unter den Linden passed through the monumental arch into the Tiergarten. She walked south on Friedrich Strasse.
As soon as she turned west on Unter den Linden she knew she was in trouble. Here again there were tanks and soldiers. Hundreds of people were gathered in front of the famous gateway. When she got to the front of the crowd, Rebecca saw another barbed-wire fence. It was strung across wooden sawhorses and guarded by East German police.
Young men who looked like Walli – leather jackets, narrow trousers, Elvis hairstyles – were shouting insults from a safe distance. On the West Berlin side, similar types were yelling angrily, and occasionally throwing stones at the police.
Looking more closely, Rebecca saw that the various policemen – Vopos, border police, and factory militia – were making holes in the road, planting tall concrete posts, and stringing barbed wire from post to post in a more permanent arrangement.
Permanent, she thought, and her spirits sank into an abyss.
She spoke to a man next to her. ‘Is it everywhere?’ she said. ‘This fence?’
‘Everywhere,’ he said. ‘The bastards.’
The East German regime had done what everyone said could not be done: they had built a wall across the middle of Berlin.
And Rebecca was on the wrong side.