I felt so happy that I nearly cried out, but Fritz made some excuse to the microphones about the water not warming up and maybe we could try in the morning instead. Then he winked at me and leaned closer to mouth the words, "Tomorrow we begin."
It was a lucky thing that this was the last day of school, because I barely heard anything my teacher said in class. We had some tests that I undoubtedly flunked, and in any other situation that would be a serious problem. But what did I care now? I wouldn't be here when the next school year began.
The one detail I did have to pay attention to was Anna. As our relationship stood right now, I wouldn't get inside her apartment for a simple drink of water, much less the chance to see the Death Strip, but I hoped to plant the idea of maybe letting me visit one day soon.
So at lunchtime I sat next to her as casually as possible. Her mouth started to drop open and then pinched closed. For the past two months, I'd eaten alone, just as she had. With my brother's arrest and her brother's death, we were equally tainted. While I picked up my sandwich, she began studying hers as if cheese and sauerkraut were suddenly too fascinating for her to be bothered with me.
My plan was to act as if everything was normal between us. It wasn't so many weeks ago when I'd never have sat anywhere for lunch other than right beside Anna, and when she'd have saved the seat for me. Why not just pretend this was one of those days?
"I'm sure excited about summer," I said enthusiastically. "Do you have any plans?"
Anna ignored me. Or pretended to. I knew she was listening.
I continued on. "Mama left to take care of my grandmother, and Fritz isn't working, so he had a great idea. We found this patch of dirt that looks completely abandoned. We might try planting a garden there. Neither of us knows much about gardening, though. Do you?" I didn't really wait for her to answer -- there wasn't any point when she was still working so hard to pretend I didn't exist.
So I reached for my dessert, a fruit crumble that was actually quite good, and kept speaking while I ate it. "The dirt patch isn't far from your apartment, just down an alley to the west. Maybe if I'm working one day and it gets too hot, I could come by for a glass of water?"
By this point, I was getting frustrated. Talking to Anna wasn't much different than talking to a stone. And I figured the stone would be friendlier.
"We'll plant corn, I think. Maybe some other stuff too, or whatever we can get seeds for. We're going to start on it today, when school is over. We probably can't sell the harvest, I'm sure the state wouldn't allow that. But we could give it away. It's too bad we can't sell it. I bet our corn will be so good, so juicy and sweet, that every family in Berlin will want some. We could make ourselves rich!"
"Stop it!" Anna slammed down her sandwich hard enough she nearly smashed it in her fist. She turned to me and hissed, "Why do you have to talk that way? Why do you have to think that way? You'll probably get in trouble for growing it, and even if you don't, why do you have to care about getting rich? I know you admire the west, Gerta, with all their rich people. But there are also many poor people too. Nobody has everything here, but at least everyone has something. Why can't that be enough for you?"
I was so taken aback by her words that I only sat there in shock. It wasn't things I longed for. What I wanted was far simpler. And somehow, much more complicated.
I wanted books that weren't censored. I wanted to see places that were now only pictures in the smuggled magazines that had passed through my hands. Places like the canals of Venice, or the beaches in the South of France, or maybe even one day the Statue of Liberty in the United States.
I wanted a home without hidden microphones, and friends and neighbors I could talk to without wondering if they would report me to the secret police.
And I wanted control over my own life, the chance to succeed. Maybe I would fail, but if I did, it shouldn't be because some Stasi official holding my file had made that decision for me.
None of that involved my interest in things, and I was angry with Anna for accusing me of caring about anything so trivial.
"If you don't want the corn we grow, then that's fine!" I said. "I wouldn't share it with you now anyway!"
Then I stood up and marched away. Only then did I realize the strange irony in my words to her. Of course I wouldn't share our corn with her. I couldn't. There was only one reason for us to be on that land and it had nothing to do with a garden.
What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and statesman
The tunnel was under way by the time I got into the shelter after school. Fritz had been let out earlier than me and was already hard at work. Where he could have barely fit his body inside the gap yesterday, now he had carved out a small cove about two meters deep. It looked beautiful.
I couldn't keep my smile from spreading. "If you work that fast every day, we'll have supper with Papa and Dominic next week!"
"Not in time for supper perhaps, but we'll share their dessert!" Fritz laughed, and pulled from his pocket a letter from Mama. Before I could read it, he said, "Oma Gertrude was worse than she thought. She sent a little money for groceries and expects to be there for at least another few weeks. This is the time we need, Gerta! I think we should try to have the tunnel built by then."
There was a downside to his news, though. Fritz was wearing a new outfit, worker's overalls, and he had a set for me. "Yours might be a little large, but it was the smallest size they had. I had to use Mama's grocery money to buy them."
"But why?" Mine was brownish-gray and the material was scratchy. I would have to stuff my skirt into the pant legs, which would make it even more uncomfortable.
"Even the hardest-working farmer would never come home as dirty as we're going to get. These clothes need to stay in this room and we'll put them on over our other clothes to work. That way, even if our hands get dirty, we won't draw nearly as much attention. And don't worry, we won't get hungry. Mama has some food saved up in the cupboards. If we're careful, we'll have what we need until she sends us more money."
I'd looked in the cupboards that morning, and there wasn't as much as he made it sound like. But this tunnel was my idea, so I couldn't very well start complaining about it. I slipped the outfit on over my school clothes and zipped it up.
"It feels like I'm playing dress-up in Papa's old clothes," I said as I tried to roll the pant legs higher.
Fritz laughed again and helped me with the sleeves, then went back to work. He pointed behind us to a bucket with a handle. "Your job will be to get rid of this dirt the best you can. The bucket will get heavy if you fill it too full, so just scoop in as much dirt as you can carry, dump it out in the basement above us, and come back for more."
Again, I wasn't too excited about that idea, but he was right. Fritz would dig much faster than I could, and someone did have to remove this dirt. Without complaining, I set to work at my end of the job.
A lot of dirt was already piled up in the shelter, so I tipped the bucket to its side, pushed dirt in until it was halfway full, and then hooked the handle over my arm to walk up the ladder. Once at the basement level, I peered around to be sure we were alone, then climbed the rest of the way up. I emptied the dirt into the farthest corner -- a lot more dirt was going to fill this room and it was better to use the space wisely. Then back down I went.
By the time I did all that, Fritz had loaded five or six times that amount of dirt into the room. I needed to work faster. So I did, but it didn't take many more trips up and down the ladder to realize I'd never be able to keep up with him, and I was already getting tired.
Maybe Fritz's job required more muscle, but I became convinced that mine was harder. I filled the bucket with as much dirt as I could possibly lift, and then had to balance that while climbing a ladder. After only an hour, my arms were beyond tired and my legs were worse. I became thirsty and the overalls were so warm, I wondered how long it would take before I baked in them.
&n
bsp; Fritz eventually noticed me slowing down and told me just to stay up top and empty the bucket for a while. He would do the work of filling it and climbing the ladder. His buckets were more full than mine had been, so after only a few trips, he doubled the size of our dirt pile in the room.
After an hour of this, he handed me another bucket and said, "Most of the dirt that I dug out is emptied. Do you think we should --"
"Quit for the night? Yes!" If he was going to end his sentence any other way, I wasn't interested.
"Come back down into the shelter, Gerta. You need to see how far we've gotten."
The hopeful tone of his voice gave new strength to my legs, and I hurried back down the ladder. As tired as I was, I still thought it was the most fabulous thing I'd ever seen.
We were probably at least as far as the exterior wall of the Welcome Building. Which meant if we were up on the surface, we would now be openly standing inside the Death Strip, somewhere between those two impassable walls of East Berlin's border.
We still had a long way to go -- I wasn't kidding myself about that. But if the rest of our digging went as well as today had gone, we would be to the other side in no time. Maybe even farther.
"Why bother stopping once we're in West Berlin?" I said, laughing. "Couldn't we keep tunneling until we reached France?"
"Absolutely," he said with a grin. "I'll make that tunnel come up right beneath the Eiffel Tower and we'll have the most original view of it anyone has ever seen!"
We laughed at that as we stripped off our overalls and hung them over the bench on the other end of the shelter. We set the bucket and shovel beside them, then climbed the ladder and replaced the heavy door over it.
"There's no point in covering this door with dirt," I said. I had done that in past visits, to hide the door in case someone did happen to look in here. But now, if someone looked in, they were bound to see the piles of fresh dirt in the corner. They'd know right away that something was up. We wouldn't be able to hide the evidence of our tunnel. All we could hope was that nobody would look.
Fritz agreed with me and then said it was extra important that we replace the boards over the windows so they looked undisturbed. "Maybe I'll even reinforce them with new boards," he said. "I'll make it impossible for someone to peek inside."
After we got out into the evening light, we realized the overalls might've protected our clothes, but our faces and hands were both smeared with dirt.
"This won't do," Fritz said. "We look like we've been tunneling. Nothing else could explain our appearance."
I pointed to the pond at the far end of the dirt patch and the irrigation river running through it. The problem was that to get there, we'd have to leave the shadow of the wall.
Fritz looked around us. "They'll see our footprints here. Better they see them all over, like a gardener's would be, instead of only near the building. We have to take the risk at some point."
"If they come --"
"If they come, then we'll show them where we want to put the garden."
I straightened up beside him, and though my legs felt numb, we casually walked toward the pond. Once there, we lay on our stomachs and washed our hands, arms, and faces. So far, nobody had come. Maybe this was okay with the guards.
Maybe.
We would've washed more, but dark was coming fast and we knew the guards in the watchtower would have spotted us by now. They didn't seem to mind that we were standing on this land, but their feelings would change after curfew, which was strictly enforced. It was time to go.
"Tomorrow we must bring water to drink," I told him as we hurried home.
"Yes, that and some food."
A smile started in the center of my heart and warmed every inch of me. No matter how hard today had been, how hungry, tired, and thirsty we both were, Fritz planned to tunnel again tomorrow too.
To begin is easy, to persist is art. -- German proverb
Our progress over the next few days was dreadfully slow. The large clumps of dirt turned into even larger rocks that seemed as impassable as the Berlin Wall itself. Fritz and I spent hours chipping at the edges to pull the rock out, but too often that just led to finding other rocks in our way.
Fritz stood back and examined the dirt wall. "If this is how the rest of tunneling will be, we might as well give up."
"Let's turn sideways and go around it." I brushed my sweaty hair out of my face. "It can't all be rock under here."
"What if it is? It could take months."
"Then let it take months!" I said. "At least we're still moving forward."
"I don't have months," Fritz said. "It's just weeks until they'll expect me for military duty." I was ready to keep arguing, but he only picked up the shovel again. "So there's really no time for complaining, eh?"
He was the one who'd complained, not me, and besides, I was still feeling the surge of energy from our brief argument. I used it to pry my fingers into the dirt and yank out one of the larger rocks. Dirt tumbled over my shoulders when it fell, but I only smiled. I felt better now.
"I should make you angry more often," he teased. "Help me carry this rock up. Then I've got some work to do above."
Earlier that morning, Fritz had removed the hinges from a closet door in our apartment. "While I screw these on the wood boards over the window, maybe you can use the rocks to build us a stairway," he said. "That way it's not such a climb for you to get out."
I did as he suggested, but spent most of that time thinking about how lucky I was to have Fritz here. He was resourceful and good with his hands. So good, in fact, that I sometimes felt like a useless child getting in his way. Sure, I helped him dig and carried buckets of dirt into the basement, and every night I was just as tired as he was when we stumbled back to the apartment. But I had also begun to appreciate how hard this tunnel project was, how much bigger than what I had first imagined.
On one of those walks home, we were stopped on the street by Frau Eberhart, who patrolled the front of our apartment building better than most of the guards in the watchtowers. She saw the dirt on our hands and faces and waddled over to us.
I looked up at Fritz. "Remember, Frau Eberhart thinks we've been gardening."
"Gardening what?" he asked.
I didn't answer because Frau Eberhart was upon us then and he could only smile politely at her.
"What a pleasure to see the two Lowe children." If she felt any pleasure, it was in watching us squirm. "I can tell you've been busy."
Her eyes flicked from me up to Fritz. I wasn't sure which of us was dirtier. We hadn't taken the time to wash off in the pond before leaving tonight. Fritz worried if we did that too often, it would stand out to the guards. Maybe that was a mistake, though. Because sure as anything, we stood out now. We might as well have pasted signs on our chests announcing our plans.
"We have been busy," I said, a bit too defensively. "And we're late for supper, so if you'll excuse us --"
"Late for whose supper?" Frau Eberhart asked. "Your mother isn't there to prepare it. Where has she been? I miss visiting with her."
She didn't miss visiting with Mama because my mother avoided her like she'd dodge a black cat sitting on a crack in the sidewalk. And this woman was far unluckier than any old wives' tale.
"Our mother is helping our grandmother recover from an injury," Fritz said. "We expect her back very soon."
"Maybe tonight!" I offered. "Which is why it would be rude to be late."
Even as the words fell from my mouth, I could've kicked myself for saying them. Why use such a stupid lie to remind her that I had already tried to lie before?
Fritz covered for me. "Gerta means that we are hungry and need to get some supper. We wish our mother was home to share it with us, but if she isn't, we expect her soon."
"Let's hope so." Frau Eberhart pursed her lips and began examining us again. "It's not wise to allow young people too much time on their own. Children will get into trouble."
"I'm not a child anymore," Fritz said. "B
y the end of this month, I'll join the military."
"And how will you fill your time until then? I heard you're not working as a bricklayer anymore."
"Gardening," I said. "That garden I told you about. We've been working on it."
"Where is it?" Frau Eberhart asked. "I used to love to garden, and I would love to come by and give you some advice."
"We'll take you there sometime." I took Fritz's arm and started to walk forward with him. "Thanks for your help, Frau Eberhart. We'd better go."
Once we were inside, Fritz stared down at me and shook his head. Even before he spoke, I understood his concern. Frau Eberhart wouldn't go away, and she would expect to see evidence of a garden.
"We haven't pulled a single weed," Fritz said. "Nor do we have permission to garden there, or any tools or seeds to get started. This is a big problem, Gerta."
I agreed completely, but after another long day of digging and pulling out rocks, my brain felt as rubbery as my arms and legs. We were running out of food in the apartment, but that was okay too. As tired as I was, I didn't feel all that hungry anyway. I barely took enough time to wash off before I fell onto my bed, already asleep as my head hit the pillow.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and statesman
I slept late the next morning, and when I awoke to bright sunshine, I darted from my bed. Why was it so quiet in here? Had Fritz overslept too?
He wasn't in his room, and when I called his name, there was no answer. Now in a panic, I ran into the front room. He was definitely gone, and his shoes were missing from beside the door.
My first thought was that he had gone over to the Welcome Building on his own, but I hoped that wasn't the case. We had agreed that it was always safer for the two of us to go there together.
Still, I went on a hunt for my shoes, wherever I had pulled them off in the fog of last night. While looking for them, I spotted a note on the kitchen table from Fritz. It only said, Be back soon. Stay here.