Karolin looked agonized. ‘Oh, God, I wish we could.’
‘People escape all the time.’
Walli and Karolin had talked of this often. Escapers swam canals, obtained false papers, hid themselves in truckloads of produce, or just sprinted across. Sometimes their stories were told on West German radio stations; more often there were all kinds of rumours.
Karolin said: ‘People die all the time, too.’
At the same time as Walli was eager to leave, he was tortured by the possibility that Karolin would be hurt, or worse, in the escape. The border guards shot to kill. And the Wall changed constantly, becoming more and more formidable. Originally it had been a barbed-wire fence. Now in many places it was a double barrier of concrete slabs with a broad floodlit middle patrolled by dogs and guarded by watchtowers. It even had tank traps. No one had ever tried to cross in a tank, though border guards fled frequently.
Walli said: ‘My sister escaped.’
‘But her husband was crippled.’
Rebecca and Bernd were married now and living in Hamburg. Both were schoolteachers, even though Bernd was in a wheelchair: he had not yet recovered completely from his fall. Their letters to Carla and Werner were always delayed by the censors, but they got through in the end.
‘I don’t want to live here, anyway,’ said Walli derisively. ‘I’ll spend my life singing songs that are approved by the Communist party, and you’ll be a bookkeeper so that your father can keep his job in the bus garage. I’d rather be dead.’
‘Communism can’t last for ever.’
‘Why not? It’s lasted since 1917. And what if we have children?’
‘What makes you say that?’ she asked sharply.
‘If we stay here, we’re not just condemning ourselves to a life in prison. Our children will suffer, too.’
‘Do you want to have children?’
Walli had not intended to raise this subject. He did not know whether he wanted children. First he needed to save his own life. ‘Well, I don’t want to have children in East Germany,’ he said. He had not thought of this before, but now that he had said it he felt sure of it.
Karolin looked serious. ‘Then maybe we should escape,’ she said. ‘But how?’
Walli had toyed with many ideas, but he had a favourite. ‘Have you seen the checkpoint near my school?’
‘I’ve never really looked.’
‘It’s used by vehicles carrying goods to West Berlin – meat, vegetables, cheese and so on.’ The East German government did not like feeding West Berlin, but they needed the money, according to Walli’s father.
‘And . . . ?’
Walli had worked out some details in his fantasy. ‘The barrier is a single length of timber about six inches thick. You show your papers, then the guard swings up the barrier to let your truck in. They inspect your load in the compound, then there’s another similar barrier to the exit.’
‘Yes, I recall the set-up.’
Walli made his voice more confident than he felt. ‘It strikes me that a driver who had trouble with the guards could probably crash through both barriers.’
‘Oh, Walli, it’s so dangerous!’
‘There’s no safe way to get out.’
‘You don’t have a truck.’
‘We’ll steal this van.’ After the show, Joe always sat in the bar while Walli packed up the drum kit and loaded the van. By the time Walli was finished, Joe was more or less drunk, and Walli would drive him home. Walli did not have a licence, but Joe did not know that, and he had never been sober enough to notice Walli’s erratic driving. After helping Joe into his apartment, Walli had to stash the kit in the hallway, then garage the van. ‘I could take it tonight, after the show,’ he said to Karolin. ‘We could go across first thing in the morning, as soon as the checkpoint opens.’
‘If I’m late home my father will come looking for me.’
‘Go home, go to bed, and get up early. I’ll wait for you outside the school. Joe won’t surface before midday. By the time he realizes his van is missing, we’ll be strolling in the Tiergarten.’
Karolin kissed him. ‘I’m scared, but I love you,’ she said.
Walli heard the band playing ‘Avalon’, the closing number of the first set, and he realized they had been talking a long time. ‘We’re on in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
The band left the stage and the dance floor emptied. It took Walli less than a minute to set up the microphones and the small guitar amplifier. The audience returned to their drinks and their conversations. Then the Bobbsey Twins came on. Some customers took no notice; others looked on with interest: Walli and Karolin made an attractive couple, and that was always a good start.
As usual, they began with ‘Noch Einen Tanz’ which got people’s attention and made them laugh. They sang some folk songs, two Everly Brothers numbers, and ‘Hey, Paula,’ a hit for an American duo very like themselves called Paul and Paula. Walli had a high voice, and sang harmonies over Karolin’s tune. He had developed a finger-picking guitar style that was rhythmic as well as melodic.
They finished with ‘If I Had a Hammer’. Most of the audience loved it, clapping along with the beat, though there were a few stern faces at the words ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ in the refrain.
They came off to loud applause. Walli’s head swam with the euphoria of knowing he had enchanted an audience. It was better than being drunk. He was flying.
Passing them in the wings, Joe said: ‘If you ever sing that song again, you’re fired.’
Walli’s elation was punctured. He felt as if he had been slapped. Furious, he said to Karolin: ‘That settles it. I’m leaving tonight.’
They returned to the van. Often they made love a second time, but tonight both were too tense. Walli was boiling with rage. ‘What’s the earliest you could meet me in the morning?’ he said to Karolin.
She thought for a minute. ‘I’ll go home now and tell them I need an early night, because I have to get up early in the morning for a rehearsal of my college’s May Day parade.’
‘Good,’ he said.
‘I could be with you by seven without arousing suspicion.’
‘That’s perfect. There won’t be much traffic through the checkpoint at that hour on a Sunday morning.’
‘Kiss me again, then.’
They kissed long and hard. Walli touched her breasts, then pulled away. ‘Next time we make love, we’ll be free,’ he said.
They got out of the van. ‘Seven o’clock,’ Walli repeated.
Karolin waved and disappeared into the night.
Walli got through the rest of the evening on a wave of hope mingled with rage. He was constantly tempted to show his scorn for Joe, but also fearful that for some reason he would not be able to steal the van. However, if he showed his feelings, Joe did not notice, and by one o’clock Walli was parked in the street outside his school. He was out of sight of the checkpoint, around two corners, which was good: he did not want the guards to see him and get suspicious.
He lay on the cushions in the back of the van with his eyes shut, but it was too cold to sleep. He spent much of the night thinking about his family. His father had been bad-tempered for more than a year. Father no longer owned the television factory in West Berlin: he had made it over to Rebecca, so that the East German government could not find a way to take it from the family. He was still trying to run the place, even though he could not go there. He had hired a Danish accountant to be his liaison. As a foreigner, Enok Andersen was able to cross between West and East Berlin once a week for a meeting with Father. It was no way to run a business, and it drove Father crazy.
Walli did not think his mother was happy either. She was mostly absorbed in her work, as head of nursing at a large hospital. She hated the Communists as much as the Nazis, but there was nothing she could do about it.
Grandmother Maud was as stoical as ever. Germany had been fighting Russia for as long as she could remember, she said, and she only hoped to live long enough to see who won. She thought that playing the guitar was an achievement, unlike Walli’s parents, who saw it as a waste of time.
The one Walli would miss most was Lili. She was fourteen now, and he liked her a lot better than he had when they were kids and she was a pest.
He tried not to think too much about the dangers ahead of him. He did not want to lose his nerve. In the small hours, when he felt his determination weakening, he thought of Joe’s words: ‘If you ever sing that song again, you’re fired.’ The recollection stoked Walli’s rage. If he stayed in East Germany, he would spend his life being told what to play by numbskulls such as Joe. It would be no life at all; it would be hell; it would be impossible. He had to leave, whatever else happened. The alternative was unthinkable.
That thought gave him courage.
At six o’clock he left the van and went in search of a hot drink and something to eat. However, there was nothing open, even at the railway stations, and he returned to the van hungrier than ever. The walking had warmed him, though.
Daylight took the chill off. He sat in the driving seat, so that he could look out for Karolin. She would find him without difficulty: she knew the vehicle, and anyway there were no other vans parked near the school.
Over and over again he visualized what he was about to do. He would take the guards by surprise. It would be several seconds before they realized what was happening. Then, presumably, they would shoot.
With any luck, by that time the guards would be behind Walli and Karolin, shooting at the back of the van. How dangerous was that? Walli really had no idea. He had never been shot at. He had never seen anyone fire a gun, for any reason. He did not know whether bullets could pass through cars or not. He recalled his father saying that hitting someone with a firearm was not as easy as it seemed in the movies. That was the extent of Walli’s knowledge.
He suffered an anxious moment when a police car drove past. The cop in the passenger seat gave Walli a hard stare. If they asked to see his driving licence he was done for. He cursed his foolishness in not staying in the back of the van. But they drove on without stopping.
In Walli’s imagination, both he and Karolin would be killed by the guards if something went wrong. But now for the first time it occurred to him that one might be hit while the other survived. That was a terrible prospect. They often said ‘I love you’ to one another, but Walli was feeling it in a different way. To love someone, he now realized, was to have something so precious that you could not bear to lose it.
An even worse possibility struck him: one of them might be crippled, like Bernd. How would Walli feel if Karolin were paralysed and it was his fault? He would want to commit suicide.
At last his watch said seven o’clock. He wondered if any of these thoughts had occurred to her. Almost certainly they had. What else would she have been thinking of in the night? Would she come walking along the street, sit next to him in the van, and quietly tell him she was not willing to take the risk? What would he do then? He could not give up, and live out his life behind the Iron Curtain. But could he leave her and go alone?
He was disappointed when seven-fifteen came around and she had not appeared.
By seven-thirty he was worried, and by eight he was in despair.
What had gone wrong?
Had Karolin’s father discovered there was no rehearsal tomorrow for the college’s May Day parade? Why would he trouble to check a thing like that?
Was Karolin ill? She had been perfectly well last night.
Had she changed her mind?
She might have.
She had never been as sure as he of the need to escape. She voiced doubts and foresaw difficulties. When they had talked about it last night, he had suspected she was against the whole idea until he mentioned raising their children in East Germany. That was when she had come round to Walli’s way of thinking. But now it looked as if she had had second thoughts.